Energy-Aware Management in Multi-UAV Deployments: Modelling and Strategies.

Victor Sanchez-Aguero,Xavier Hesselbach,Francisco Valera,Ivan Vidal,Christian Tipantuña

doi:10.3390/s20102791

Abstract

Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are frequently present in the civilian environment. However, proper implementations of different solutions based on these aircraft still face important challenges. This article deals with multi-UAV systems, forming aerial networks, mainly employed to provide Internet connectivity and different network services to ground users. However, the mission duration (hours) is longer than the limited UAVs’ battery life-time (minutes). This paper introduces the UAV replacement procedure as a way to guarantee ground users’ connectivity over time. This article also formulates the practical UAV replacements problem in moderately large multi-UAV swarms and proves it to be an NP-hard problem in which an optimal solution has exponential complexity. In this regard, the main objective of this article is to evaluate the suitability of heuristic approaches for different scenarios. This paper proposes betweenness centrality heuristic algorithm (BETA), a graph theory-based heuristic algorithm. BETA not only generates solutions close to the optimal (even with 99% similarity to the exact result) but also improves two ground-truth solutions, especially in low-resource scenarios.

Highlights

IntroductionThe unstoppable growth of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (commonly known as drones) ecosystem during these last years, has been proven to be just the beginning of a near-future global phenomenon
The unstoppable growth of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) ecosystem during these last years, has been proven to be just the beginning of a near-future global phenomenon
This article formulates the practical UAV replacements problem in moderately large multi-UAV swarms and proves it to be an NP-hard problem in which an optimal solution has exponential complexity

Summary

Introduction

The unstoppable growth of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (commonly known as drones) ecosystem during these last years, has been proven to be just the beginning of a near-future global phenomenon. UAVs will grow eightfold over the decade and will become the largest segment of the civilian market. The utilization of multi-UAV systems, because of their rapid deployment, mobility, and flexibility, has recently attracted attention to support/extend the fifth-generation cellular network technology (5G). In extraordinary situations (e.g., massified events, natural disasters, infrastructure failures). In exceptional or emergency circumstances, the deployment of 5G terrestrial infrastructure may not be economically viable. The deployment times of these extraordinary on-demand 5G network services should meet the Key Performance

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