Construction of FANETs for user coverage and information transmission in disaster rescue scenarios

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a flying ad hoc network (FANET) construction problem in a post-disaster scenario where ground users (GUs) lose contact with the outside world. The main objective of the FANET is to provide communication coverage for as many as GUs, and to transmit disaster information back to the rescue center as soon as possible. To solve this FANET construction problem, we first propose a FANET construction algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. To improve the performance of the PSO-based FANET construction algorithm, we further model the FANET construction problem as an ordinary potential game (OPG), and propose a better-response-based FANET construction algorithm. Several simulation experiments are presented to evaluate the effectiveness of these proposed two algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that both the PSO-based FANET construction algorithm and the better-response-based FANET construction algorithm can be used to maximize the coverage rate of GUs and minimize the average transmission delay from rescue UAVs to the gateway UAV. Moreover, the better-response-based FANET construction algorithm has a fast convergence rate, and performs better than the PSO-based FANET construction algorithm and other baselines in terms of coverage rate and average transmission delay.