15,703 research outputs found
Design of Ad Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks Formed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Advanced Mechanical Automation
Ad hoc wireless mesh networks formed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
equipped with wireless transceivers (access points (APs)) are increasingly
being touted as being able to provide a flexible "on-the-fly" communications
infrastructure that can collect and transmit sensor data from sensors in
remote, wilderness, or disaster-hit areas. Recent advances in the mechanical
automation of UAVs have resulted in separable APs and replaceable batteries
that can be carried by UAVs and placed at arbitrary locations in the field.
These advanced mechanized UAV mesh networks pose interesting questions in terms
of the design of the network architecture and the optimal UAV scheduling
algorithms. This paper studies a range of network architectures that depend on
the mechanized automation (AP separation and battery replacement) capabilities
of UAVs and proposes heuristic UAV scheduling algorithms for each network
architecture, which are benchmarked against optimal designs.Comment: 12 page
Physics-Based Swarm Intelligence for Disaster Relief Communications
This study explores how a swarm of aerial mobile vehicles can provide network
connectivity and meet the stringent requirements of public protection and
disaster relief operations. In this context, we design a physics-based
controlled mobility strategy, which we name the extended Virtual Force Protocol
(VFPe), allowing self-propelled nodes, and in particular here unmanned aerial
vehicles, to fly autonomously and cooperatively. In this way, ground devices
scattered on the operation site may establish communications through the
wireless multi-hop communication routes formed by the network of aerial nodes.
We further investigate through simulations the behavior of the VFPe protocol,
notably focusing on the way node location information is disseminated into the
network as well as on the impact of the number of exploration nodes on the
overall network performance.Comment: in International Conference on Ad Hoc Networks and Wireless, Jul
2016, Lille, Franc
Autonomous 3D Exploration of Large Structures Using an UAV Equipped with a 2D LIDAR
This paper addressed the challenge of exploring large, unknown, and unstructured
industrial environments with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The resulting system combined
well-known components and techniques with a new manoeuvre to use a low-cost 2D laser to measure
a 3D structure. Our approach combined frontier-based exploration, the Lazy Theta* path planner, and
a flyby sampling manoeuvre to create a 3D map of large scenarios. One of the novelties of our system
is that all the algorithms relied on the multi-resolution of the octomap for the world representation.
We used a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HitL) simulation environment to collect accurate measurements
of the capability of the open-source system to run online and on-board the UAV in real-time. Our
approach is compared to different reference heuristics under this simulation environment showing
better performance in regards to the amount of explored space. With the proposed approach, the UAV
is able to explore 93% of the search space under 30 min, generating a path without repetition that
adjusts to the occupied space covering indoor locations, irregular structures, and suspended obstaclesUnión Europea Marie Sklodowska-Curie 64215Unión Europea MULTIDRONE (H2020-ICT-731667)Uniión Europea HYFLIERS (H2020-ICT-779411
A Distributed Approach for Networked Flying Platform Association with Small Cells in 5G+ Networks
The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a
promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever
increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an
intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell
base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the
backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network.
Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations
and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the
popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked
flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned
balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The
association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is
formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as
maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an
efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a
greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A
favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed
method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and
run-time speed.Comment: Submitted to IEEE GLOBECOM 2017, 7 pages and 4 figure
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