Research On Real-Time Reliable Communication And Collaboration For UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)technology has attracted great attention and achieved great advancements in recent years,and it has a wide range of applications.The communication among the UAVs is a critical issue to support these applications.However,due to the high mobility and unpredictability of movements,most of the existing routing algorithms are not suitable for UAV networks.In this paper,we propose a distributed virtual backbone construction algorithm for UAV networks.We also propose a distributed protocol to dynamically maintain this communication backbone.Our algorithm is purely distributed and scalable,as we only use the neighbor information of UAVs.We first propose a stability metrics for each UAV based on its relative distance with neighbors.Then,we cluster all UAVs based on their stability values,so that the clustering structure is stable and energy-efficient.We utilize the over-heard messages broadcasted by the neighboring UAVs to construct the virtual backbone efficiently to interconnect all cluster heads(CHs).Our virtual backbone construction algorithm is efficient in terms of number of messages broadcasted by each UAV and the completion time of the backbone construction.Simulation results also demonstrated that our proposed algorithm is efficient and effective.With the trend that drones become more intelligent,the application of multi-UAV has become more and more complicated.In recent years,consumer drones are widely used,but the communication and computing ability of drones are still limited.They cannot communicate with each other directly and fly cooperatively.In this thesis,we focus on the study of drones that can fly autonomously in UAV networks.Base on an industrial UAV,we add onboard high-performance computing devices and wireless communication devices to enable the UAV to communicate directly with each other and process real-time data,so that it can perform more complex algorithms and operations.By using the SDK provided by UAV,we can interact with flight control system of the UAV,so that we can develop programs and UAV control logic to make UAVs flying cooperatively and automatically.We use a distributed method to make the functional programs relatively independent with the flight control programs.It makes them can be updated and replaced easily.Therefore,our flight platform is able to perform collaborative missions autonomously and its applications are easy to develop and scalable.Finally,the simulation and reality experiments are carried out on this flight platform.The results show that it has the ability to complete the multi-UAV flight missions autonomously and cooperatively.