SOAN: Self-organizing aerial networks

Abstract

Flying objects, including quadrotors or hexacopters, have grown in popularity mainly due to technology advancements, reduced cost, and its simplicity. In the past years, these flying objects have been investigated to be applied to diverse activities, such as rescue missions, search, monitoring, and surveillance. Because of its small size and easy maintenance, the flying object is deployed, in some cases, in a group context, acting as cooperative agents and forming a network of flying objects. These flying object networks have network maintenance and flying objects positioning challenges, including maintaining the network connectivity, avoiding flying objects collisions, and building a communication path to the Internet with good link quality. In this paper, we discuss the arrangement of flying objects in space to guarantee network operations. In this paper it is proposed SOAN (self-organizing aerial networks), a self-organizing, decentralized, and adaptive topology control for flying object networks that allows us to balance the network coverage and the communication quality among flying objects. Our solution reduces the number of retransmission packets and increases the signal quality on the communication path.