Optimal Desired Trajectories of UAVs in Private UAV Networks

Abstract

There are many applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks where all UAVs belong to one organization or a person. In such applications, the number of UAVs that can be employed is also limited due to the cost factor. Due to this reason, private UAV networks have been introduced recently for such purposes. Since the number of UAVs used in private UAV networks are small, traditional routing techniques that have been proposed for Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) are not suitable for routing messages through them. This is because, unlike in FANETs, the challenge in private UAV networks is to find a neighbor to route the packets. Therefore, the movements of UAV nodes should be controlled in private UAV networks in such a way that each UAV node has a neighbor at all times that is connected to the Ground Station (GS). In this paper, we propose a simple approach to control the desired trajectories of all UAV nodes, when the leading UAV node receives a command to move to a target location. Our method minimizes the total distance travelled by all UAVs in such a movement.