PaFiR : Particle Filter Routing – a predictive relaying scheme for UAV-assisted IoT communications in future innovated networks

Increasing urbanization, smart cities and other cutting-edge technologies offer the prospect of providing more functions to benefit citizens by relying on the substantial data processing and exchange capabilities now possible. This can generate significant unpredictable and unbalanced data loads for the bearing IoT network to support its application and service demands. We thus propose a wireless routing scheme designed to use the Particle Filter algorithm to empower portable smart devices with intelligent capacities for the radio communication system. This facilitates the offloading of traffic from traditional wireless networks and enables the IoT system to adopt unmanned aerial vehicles, thus also offering further innovation to flying network platforms. The proposed PaFiR routing protocol offers the network more scalability, tolerance and resilience, to achieve the goal of smart relaying. Simulation results that demonstrate the routing algorithm designed offers excellent performance when compared with existing wireless relaying schemes. It provides delivery ratios that are improved by up to 40% without unmanageable increases in latency or overheads

Formation coordination and network management of UAV networks using particle swarm optimization and software-defined networking

In recent years, with the growth in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), UAV-based systems have become popular in both military and civil applications. The lack of reliable communication infrastructure in these scenarios has motivated the use of UAVs to establish a network as flying nodes, also known as UAV networks. However, the high mobility degree of flying and terrestrial users may be responsible for constant changes in nodes’ positioning, which makes it more challenging to guarantee their communication during the operational time. In this context, this work presents a framework solution for formation coordination and network management of UAVs, which aims to establish and maintain a set of relays units in order to provide a constant, reliable and efficient communication link among user nodes - which are performing individual or collaborative missions on its turn. Such a framework relies on a set of formation coordination algorithms - including the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) evolutionary algorithm -, and also considers the use of Software-defined Networking-based (SDN) communication protocol for network management. For coordination proposes, a novel particle selection criteria is proposed, which aims to guarantee network manageability of UAV formations, therefore being able to guarantee service persistence in case of nodes’ failure occurrence, as well as to provide required network performance, as a consequence. Simulations performed in OMNeT++ show the efficiency of the proposed solution and prove a promising direction of the solution for accomplishing its purposes.Em regiões de confrontos militares, em cenários pós-catástrofes naturais e, inclusive, em grandes áreas de cultivo agrícola, é comum a ausência de uma infra-estrutura préestabelecida de comunicação entre usuários durante a execução de uma ou mais operações eventuais. Nestes casos, Veículos Aéreos Não Tripulados (VANTs) podem ser vistos como uma alternativa para o estabelecimento de uma rede temporária durante essas missões. Para algumas aplicações, a alta mobilidade destes usuários podem trazem grandes desafios para o gerenciamento autônomo de uma estrutura de comunicação aérea, como a organização espacial dos nós roteadores e as políticas de encaminhamento de pacotes adotadas durante a operação. Tendo isso em vista, esse trabalho apresenta o estudo de uma solução que visa o estabelecimento e manutenção das conexões entre os usuários - nos quais executam tarefas individuais ou colaborativas -, através do uso de algoritmos de coordenação de formação - no qual inclui o algoritmo evolucionário Otimização por Enxame de Partículas -, e, também, de conceitos relacionados a Rede Definidas por Software para o gerenciamento da rede. Ainda, é proposto um novo critério de seleção das partículas do algoritmo evolucionário, visando garantir gerenciabilidade das topologias formadas e, consequentemente, a persistência do serviço em caso de falha dos nós roteadores, assim como o cumprimento de especificações desejadas para o desempenho da rede. Simulações em OMNeT++ mostraram a eficácia da proposta e sustentam o modelo proposto a fim de atingir seus objetivos

On Greedy Routing in Dynamic UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are becoming increasingly popular for various applications. Freely flying drones create highly dynamic environments, where conventional routing algorithms which rely on stationary network contact graphs fail to perform efficiently. Also, link establishment through exploring optimal paths using hello messages (as is used in AODV algorithm) deems extremely inefficient and costly for rapidly changing network topologies. In this paper, we present a distance-based greedy routing algorithm for UAV networks solely based on UAVs' local observations of their surrounding subnetwork. Thereby, neither a central decision maker nor a time-consuming route setup and maintenance mechanism are required. To evaluate the proposed method, we derive an analytical bound for the expected number of hops that a packet traverses. Also, we find the expected end-to-end distance traveled by each packet as well as the probability of successful delivery. The simulation results verify the accuracy of the developed analytical expressions and show considerable improvement compared to centralized shortest path routing algorithms.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted in IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (SECON), Workshop on Communications, Data Processing and Control for Unmanned Autonomous Systems (CPC-UAV

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future