DFRA: Demodulation-free random access for UAV ad hoc networks

Abstract

Due to the agility, low-cost and robustness, UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Ad Hoc Networks formed by small UAVs have popular application in the battlefield. Considering the high mobility of UAV which may exit and join in the networks frequently, random access is critical for UAV Ad Hoc Networks. Due to the complex and serious electromagnetic environment in the battlefield, how to identify the MAC protocol when demodulation is unrealistic and switch to this MAC protocol adaptively is challenging. In this paper, we propose Demodulation-free Random Access (DFRA) scheme which can help UAVs join in the UAV ad hoc networks without demodulating the property field of MAC protocol header. First, we propose an adaptive feature extraction algorithm and use it for machine learning based MAC protocol identification. Then, DFRA adopts an adaptive MAC switching framework to access the networks. We implement DFRA with USRP N210 and evaluate the performance by experiments. The results show that DFRA can guarantee access accuracy rate over 95% when demodulation is unrealistic.