Performance evaluation of ad-hoc based aerial monitoring system

Abstract

Recently there is a huge interest in designing and implementing systems that can be used in surveillance and emergency situations. These systems are designed and implemented using two main technologies that are: Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) and the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). MANETs with its unique characteristics of rapid deployment, self-organization and cost effectivenes had made it a popular topic for designers and developers to design and implement such systems. In this paper, a prototype system was designed and implemented using MANETs and UAVs; this system can be developed to be used as an aerial monitoring system in surveillance and security issues, the system was used to record and send a real-time video from source to destination node over a multihop path. This system was first implemented and tested using testbed method, then it was simulated using network simulator (NS-3) with two case studies to evaluate the performance of the system using two routing protocols (Ad-hoc On-Demand Destance Vector AODV[1] and Optimised Link State Routing OLSR [2]). The evaluating metrics used here are; delay, average jitter, packet loss ratio (PLR) and packet delivery factor (PDF) against variable number of nodes. The optained results of the test bed method showed the configuration parameters and self-organization characteristics of MANET, the results obtained from the simulation platform illustrated that the OLSR had outperformed the AODV protocol in dense networks and the optimum number of nodes needed to cover the simulation area were 90 nodes.