UAV relay network deployment through the area with barriers

Abstract

Flying ad hoc networks composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are flexible, inexpensive, and fast to deploy. This makes them a very attractive technology for many civilian and military applications. Due to the high mobility of the nodes, maintaining a multi-hop communication link between the UAVs is a challenging task. The existing network deployment method designed for relay network may fail to guarantee the connectivity due to the limited wireless transmission and dynamic topology. Designing and implementing a cost-effective UAV relay network is still a problem when there are barriers between the source node and the ground control station. In this paper, we first build a general UAV relay network model; then we propose a UAV deployment algorithm based on Q-learning to construct a UAV relay network with the minimum number of nodes, and we use an Equidistant Node Control algorithm to construct a dynamic relay path. We conduct a series of experiments on the OMNeT++ simulation platform to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that our UAV relay network has the lower cost and reliable communication performance.