DroneNetX: Network Reconstruction Through Connectivity Probing and Relay Deployment by Multiple UAVs in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a network reconstruction problem using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) where stationary ad hoc networks are severely damaged in a post-disaster scenario. The main objective of this paper is to repair the network by supplementing aerial wireless links into the isolated ground network using UAVs. Our scheme performs network probing from the air and finds out crucial spots where both local and global routing performance can significantly be recovered if deployed. First, we propose a novel distributed coverage path planning algorithms with independent and computationally lightweight navigation based on adaptive zigzag patterns. Second, we present route topology discovery schemes that capture both local and non-local network connectivity by extracting inherent route skeletons via stitching partial local paths obtained from the simple packet probing by UAVs. Finally, we find the optimal UAV relay deployment positions that can improve network-wide data delivery most effectively based on three novel approaches of an optimization technique, an iterative heuristic algorithm, and a topology partitioning of strongly connected component. Simulation results demonstrate that our distributed traversing algorithms reduce the complete coverage time, the travel distance, and the duplicate coverage compared to other counterpart algorithms. Our deployment algorithms recover severely impaired routes, incurring reasonable computational overhead.