Drone-Based Highway-VANET and DAS Service

Abstract

Wireless communications between vehicles are a focus of research in both the academic research community and automobile industry. Using unmanned aerial vehicles or drones in wireless communications and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have started to attract attention. This paper proposes a routing protocol that uses the infrastructure drones for boosting VANET communications to achieve a minimum vehicle-to-drone packet delivery delay. This paper also proposes a closed-form expression for the probability distribution of the vehicle-to-drone packet delivery delay on a two-way highway. In addition, based on that closed-form expression, we can calculate the minimum drone density (maximum separation distance between two adjacent drones) that stochastically limits the worst case of the vehicle-to-drone packet delivery delay. Moreover, this paper proposes a drones-active service that is added to the location service in a VANET. This service dynamically and periodically obtains the required number of active drones based on the current highway connectivity state by obtaining the maximum distance between each two adjacent drones while satisfying a probabilistic constraint for vehicle-to-drone packet delivery delay. Our analysis focuses on two-way highway VANET networks with low vehicular density. The simulation results show the accuracy of our analysis and reflect the relation between the drone density, vehicular density and speed, other VANET parameters, and the vehicle-to-drone packet delivery delay.