Joint Mission Assignment and Location Management for UAVs in Mission-critical Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In recent years, the emergence of a flying ad hoc network (FANET) with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can make it possible to effectively accomplish not only far-off missions but also assorted complex missions. In particular, with a limited number of UAVs, it is important to determine both mission assignment of UAVs to enhance mission performance and locations of UAVs to maintain good communication with the ground control station (GCS). In this paper, we study a problem of joint mission assignment and location management for UAVs, with jointly considering communication and mission performance. To solve the problem, employing particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm in part, we develop an heuristic algorithm that assigns multiple UAVs to multiple missions and finds locations of all UAVs together to maximize the weighted sum of the communication and mission performance. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm provides a good solution.