A Heuristic Approach for the Design of UAV-Based Disaster Relief in Optical Metro Networks

We propose a novel algorithm to dimension the backup elements in an optical metro network, by considering the adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and wireless interfaces to realize backup wireless links. Our key idea is to efficiently find the set of node pairs that have to be connected by means of multi-hop UAV-based wireless links, which are selected based on the simulation of multiple disaster events. Results, obtained over a set of meaningful scenarios, demonstrate that our solution can greatly reduce the total installation costs compared to a naive approach, which is instead solely tailored to the restoration of the disrupted links in a given disaster scenario