Abstract
In this paper, a novel medium access control (MAC) layer protocol is introduced for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based mission critical wireless sensor networks (MC-WSN), which is an important application of mission critical sensor and sensor networks (MC-SSN). The UAVs hovering in the three-dimensional monitoring networks are distributed in subsets according to their distance from the center station. UAVs in the same subset are contending for access and transmission, while each subset is allotted a slot based on adaptive time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme. As a multi-channel system, a novel channel allocation algorithm is presented for subset relay transmission period to optimize the performance of networks. The UAV returning period for charging is utilized in the protocol to enhance the transmission throughput and mitigate delay. Detection slot and position prediction algorithm are designed in the UAV returning period to improve the throughput and reduce the delay. The simulation results verify the improvement on throughput and delays of the proposed protocol for UAV-based MC-WSN.
Highlights
During past decades, many efforts have been made on the transmission performance improvement of mission critical wireless sensor networks (MC-WSN), which are defined as applications demanding high data throughput in time with reliability and belong to an important application scenario of mission critical sensor and sensor networks (MC-SSN) [1]
To show the superiority of the proposed protocol in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based MC-WSN on throughput and delay, we compare the protocol to carrier sense multiple access (CSMA)/CA protocol, and to other related approaches in [12] named X-medium access control (MAC)/binary exponential back-off (BEB), and [18] which utilizes 27-time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme. They are represented as X-MAC/BEB and 27-TDMA in the simulations, respectively
The proposed protocol provides a much higher throughput than CSMA/CA. It significantly improves the networks throughput when the number of UAVs is more than 120 in the system comparing to X-MAC/BEB and 27-TDMA scheme. This is because a larger number of UAV sensors yield a higher collision in X-MAC/BEB and 27-TDMA, but it has a less influence in the proposed protocol due to its subsets transmission slots design
Summary
Many efforts have been made on the transmission performance improvement of mission critical wireless sensor networks (MC-WSN), which are defined as applications demanding high data throughput in time with reliability and belong to an important application scenario of mission critical sensor and sensor networks (MC-SSN) [1]. To improve the access and transmission performance of UAV networks, medium access control (MAC) layer of communications has been developed in isolation [5]. Different network systems have different requirements on throughput and delay. Unlike other networks applied to traffic monitoring, target tracking and climate experiment, UAV based MC-WSN needs a high throughput and a low delay. The frequently used mathematical notations are presented as Table. 1
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