A cost-efficient elastic UAV relay network construction method with guaranteed QoS

Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) have been widely adopted to collect data in dangerous or inaccessible areas due to their unique characteristics, including on-demand deployment, flexibility, low-cost, and mobility. However, limited power supply severely restricts the transmission range of a UAV, thus the sensed data needs to be transmitted to the ground control station (GCS) with the help of multiple UAVs in a multi-hop manner. This paper firstly describes the general process of the UAV relay network deployment, and analyzes the number of relay UAVs needed by two types of straightforward static model, i.e. track-based dynamic routing model with planned path and the infrastructure-based dynamic routing model with uncertain path. Deploying the relay UAVs in a static way as current works do cannot fulfill the requirements for an ideal UAV relay network, such as high reliability, low-cost and guaranteed quality of service. Thus, we detail our prediction-based dynamic relay network deployment model, and prove that our proposal is feasible and requires less number of relay UAVs while providing higher communication quality compared with state-of-the-art methods. Based on this model, an Elastic Relay Network Construction (ERNetC) algorithm is proposed. Finally, a series of simulation experiments are conducted on OMNeT++ simulation platform to evaluate the performance of ERNetC algorithm. Simulation results show that ERNetC algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in total interruption time as well as goodput. (c) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.