Abstract
For handling the broken-down communication infrastructure when a disaster event happens, this paper proposes to dispatch the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to the disaster area as the relay node, which further forms a Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET). Since the UAV only owns limited energy and a disaster event may need multiple UAVs to cover its area, an efficient multi-UAV dispatch algorithm is critical to recover the communication link of the disaster area. In this paper, we adopt the mobile ground control station (GCS) to transport UAVs to the boundary of the disaster area first. According to the UAV energy consumption rate during flight and two communication modes, the UAV charging progress, and the number of required UAVs of the event, the mobile GCS then executes the proposed energy-aware multi-UAV dispatch algorithm (EAMUD) to dispatch multiple UAVs to this disaster area for building the FANET. Hence, the broken-down link in the disaster area is recovered after the FANET connects to nearby network infrastructure. Further, we propose the multi-UAV handoff scheme and exception handling processes to replace energy-exhausted UAVs for maximizing the event communication time of the disaster event. Finally, we execute simulations for related work and four EAMUD variants under different parameter values in the real scenario. These results exhibit that EAMUD with the Postpone method (EAMUD-P) achieves the highest event communication time among all these schemes.
Highlights
Introduction and Related WorkIn recent years, the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) applications have grown rapidly [1,2]because the UAV owns several characteristics [3,4] such as higher mobility, less interference by fewer obstacles in the air, more flexible capability by equipped with different sensors, etc
Before the ground control station (GCS) dispatches a UAV for a sub-event recorded in its event queue when the processing time of this sub-event has come, it will first check whether it could dispatch the required UAVs for all sub-events, which belong to the parent event of the current sub-event, at their processing time or not
We compare performance results of five schemes, which have to handle subsequent UAV handover processes and UAV dispatch exceptions, in the real scenario, where all events last for the fixed event duration (Tev ) and the starting time of each event is randomly chosen during the simulation time
Summary
The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) applications have grown rapidly [1,2]. Due to the limited communication range and available battery energy of each UAV, the ground control station (GCS) proposed in this paper adopts the proposed energy-aware multi-UAV dispatch algorithm (EAMUD) to dispatch different numbers of UAVs to corresponding locations on each link-broken road. We propose the energy-aware multi-UAV dispatch algorithm (EAMUD) to dispatch multiple UAVs to the disaster area for building the FANET, by considering the UAV battery charging progress and energy consumption for flying and communication. For continuing communication of the broken link before the dispatched UAV drains its remaining energy, we propose the UAV handover process of EAMUD such that GCS can dispatch an optimal UAV to hand over the dispatched one.
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