UAPM: An urgency-aware packet management for disaster management using flying ad-hoc networks

Abstract

The ever increasing demand of adhoc networks for adaptive topology and mobility aware communication led to new paradigm of networking among Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) known as Flying ad-hoc Networks (FANETs). Due to their dynamic topology, FANETs can be deployed for disaster monitoring and surveillance applications. During these operations, UAVs need to transmit different disaster data, which consists of different types of data packets. Among them there are packets which need to be transmitted urgently because of the emergency situation in disaster management. To handle this situation, we propose a methodology of disaster data classification using urgency level and based on these urgency levels, priority index is assigned to data packets. An approach of Urgency Aware Scheduling (UAS) is proposed to efficiently transmit high and low priority packets with minimum delays in transmission queue. We take into account different scenarios of UAVs for disaster management and for N number of UAVs, we propose bio-inspired mechanism using behavioral study of bird flocking for cluster formation and maintenance. Furthermore, we propose a priority based route selection methodology for data communication in FANET cluster. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism shows better performance in the presence of evaluation benchmarks like average delay, queuing time, forward percentage and fairness.