Abstract
In disaster scenarios where communication networks have broken down, it is important to ensure a reliable data delivery from an emergency operations center to the local target nodes within its effective time limit. We propose a hybrid data delivery mechanism that exploits the load-carry-and-delivery by UAVs with a mixture of localized ad-hoc routing over partially connected terrestrial networks. We aim to achieve reliable on-time data delivery to the target nodes, while preserving the low routing cost. Our proposed routing methodology consists of three steps: 1) localized network construction, 2) network probing by UAVs, and 3) localized ad-hoc routing based on a dynamic depth routing tree depending on the data urgency. Here, we present an innovative cost-effective local data sharing structure called localized minimal routing tree that balances with the direct data delivery by UAVs. After the initial network setup and probing procedure, each UAV makes a series of near-optimal decisions of which grid points to visit considering its localized network topology and data urgency. Our time-dependent routing mechanism dynamically decides data recipient nodes to serve more urgent data delivery with a higher priority at a time. The simulation experiments validated our combined path planning and routing approach, achieving 71% higher reliability than the best possible performance by using only the network nodes and consuming 20% lower energy than the UAV-only approach, while maintaining high reliability. Thus, our work makes a strong case for systematically combining the two approaches.
Highlights
Emergency preparedness against the event of natural or man-made disasters has increasingly become one of the vital prerequisites for protecting civilian lives and urban facilities
Depending on the urgency degree and the location of the data to be delivered by a unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it can change its own navigation priority to maximize the percentage of successful data delivery given each distinct time constraint, across a certain region of interest (RoI)
We investigated how our algorithm based on a balanced mixture of direct UAV data delivery and static ad-hoc routing advanced the pure static ad-hoc routing without any UAVs in severely disconnected networks
Summary
Emergency preparedness against the event of natural or man-made disasters has increasingly become one of the vital prerequisites for protecting civilian lives and urban facilities. Under these disaster situations, the telecommunications infrastructure is likely to have broken down because of the physical destruction of the network devices or network congestion [1]. To users is a considerably challenging task with severely degraded node reachability To tackle this challenge, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be leveraged as extraordinary information messengers, delivering data from an emergency operations center to the affected areas or users in isolated ad-hoc networks. Depending on the urgency degree and the location of the data to be delivered by a UAV, it can change its own navigation priority to maximize the percentage of successful data delivery given each distinct time constraint, across a certain region of interest (RoI)
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