Abstract
When telecommunication infrastructure is damaged by natural disasters, creating a network that can handle voice channels can be vital for search and rescue missions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) equipped with WiFi access points could be rapidly deployed to provide wireless coverage to ground users. This WiFi access network can in turn be used to provide a reliable communication service to be used in search and rescue missions. We formulate a new problem for UAVs optimal deployment which considers not only WiFi coverage but also the mac sublayer (i.e., quality of service). Our goal is to dispatch the minimum number of UAVs for provisioning a WiFi network that enables reliable VoIP communications in disaster scenarios. Among valid solutions, we choose the one that minimizes energy expenditure at the user’s WiFi interface card in order to extend ground user’s smartphone battery life as much as possible. Solutions are found using well-known heuristics such as K-means clusterization and genetic algorithms. Via numerical results, we show that the IEEE 802.11 standard revision has a decisive impact on the number of UAVs required to cover large areas, and that the user’s average energy expenditure (attributable to communications) can be reduced by limiting the maximum altitude for drones or by increasing the VoIP speech quality.
Highlights
The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in natural disasters has become popular in recent years [1, 2]
Results suggest that the number of drones obtained with our heuristics tends to grow linearly with the density of users in the scenario under consideration, outperforming the solutions found with kmeans in the studied cases
This is attributable to an increment in the number of UAVs (see Figure 11(a)), which is consistent with our hypothesis since the number of users associated with each Access Points (APs) decreases due to the increment in the number of UAVs
Summary
The use of UAVs in natural disasters has become popular in recent years [1, 2]. During the critical first 72 hours, UAVs can be used for tasks such as situational awareness [3], deploying communication systems [4,5,6], or search and rescue (SAR) missions [7]. In [8] the authors identify the main building blocks (e.g., commanding, surveying, relaying, etc.) and its communication requirements in terms of tolerance to delay, jitter and minimum throughput. Such requirements should be carefully considered when selecting wireless link technologies for either UAV-to-UAV or UAV-to-Infrastructure communication [9]. QoS performance in shared access networks such as WiFi does depend on signal coverage and on the traffic generated/consumed by ground users sharing the medium, and if speech quality degrades, the communication service cannot be used.
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