Engineering a Suburban Ad-Hoc Network

Networks are growing in popularity, as wireless communication hardware, both fixed and mobile, becomes more common and affordable. The Monash Suburban Ad-Hoc Network (SAHN) project has devised a system that provides a highly secure and survivable ad-hoc network, capable of delivering broadband speeds to co-operating users within a fixed environment, such as a residential neighbourhood, or a campus. The SAHN can be used by residents within a community to exchange information, to share access to the Internet, providing last-mile access, or for local telephony and video conferencing. SAHN nodes are designed to be self-configuring and selfmanaging, relying on no experienced user intervention. Thus, they are suitable for use by the general public, in ‘plug-and-play’ fashion. This paper investigates possible architectures for an implementation of the SAHN (Tyson 2005), and presents a real-world prototype. The prototype presented takes the form of a Linux kernel module, and a user-space daemon

A Survey of Air-to-Ground Propagation Channel Modeling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly for small UAVs, due to their affordable prices, ease of availability, and ease of operability. Existing and future applications of UAVs include remote surveillance and monitoring, relief operations, package delivery, and communication backhaul infrastructure. Additionally, UAVs are envisioned as an important component of 5G wireless technology and beyond. The unique application scenarios for UAVs necessitate accurate air-to-ground (AG) propagation channel models for designing and evaluating UAV communication links for control/non-payload as well as payload data transmissions. These AG propagation models have not been investigated in detail when compared to terrestrial propagation models. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is provided on available AG channel measurement campaigns, large and small scale fading channel models, their limitations, and future research directions for UAV communication scenarios