Abstract
Exchanging messages with stable connections in missions composed of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) remains a challenge. The variations in UAV distances from each other, considering their individual trajectories, and the medium dynamic factors are important points to be addressed.In this context, to increase the stability of UAV-to-UAV (U2U) communication with link quality, this paper presents an interface manager (IM) that is capable of improving communication in multi-UAV networks.Given a predefined set of available individual wireless interfaces, the proposed IM dynamically defines the best interface for sending messages based on on-flight conditions sensed and calculated dynamically from the wireless medium. Different simulation scenarios are generated using a complex and realistic experimental setup composed of traditional simulators such as NS-3, Gazebo, and GzUAV. IEEE 802.11n 2.4 GHz and 802.11p 5 GHz interfaces are used for the IM selection. The IM performance is evaluated in terms of metrics from the medium-access-control (MAC) and physical layers, which aim to improve and maintain the connectivity between the UAVs during the mission, and from the application layer, which targets the reliability in the delivery of messages. The obtained results show that compared with the cases where a single interface is used, the proposed IM is able to increase the network throughput and presents the best proportion of transmitted and received packets, reception power (−60 dBm to −75 dBm), and loss (−80 dB to −85 dB), resulting in a more efficient and stable network connections.
Highlights
The application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is proving to be extremely useful in a variety of areas, from agriculture to military missions [1,2]
The results demonstrated that the latency is stable up to a distance of m between the cluster heads and the member clusters with support for real-time video transmissions, presenting rates between 4 and 6 Mbps and received strength signal (RSS) above −60 dBm considering pre-existing integrated communication interfaces in UAVs
Other alternatives to maintain the reliability of these wireless networks include complementary mechanisms to a communication protocol, which function by managing the assignments of the frequency channels [33], and efficient algorithm systems that optimize the quality of the message exchange and the repositioning schemes of the nodes [34] in order to improve their connection intensity [7,35]
Summary
The application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is proving to be extremely useful in a variety of areas, from agriculture to military missions [1,2]. The need to exchange messages appears in many of these applications, either in the form of UAV-to-UAV (U2U). This allows remote access to difficult areas, where video transmission and additional measurement data traffic are needed, such as in applications for border and cave monitoring, natural disaster monitoring, search and rescue (SAR). The main issues are maintaining reliable connections between high-mobility nodes, signal quality, low delay, and a high message delivery rate between nodes. These metrics are of utmost importance for guaranteeing the quality of service in systems involving mobile UAV networks. Other approaches aimed at buffering and exchanging messages only during the occurrence of events-of-interest [7] or, alternatively, within predefined time intervals [8,9]
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