Design principles for cooperative relaying on UAVs-based FANET

Abstract

Recent years have observed a good improvement in wireless communication network capabilities. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based wireless communication is an emerging area to support existing network expansions and to support a number of applications at lower costs. UAVs can be used as aerial relays forming flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) to meet the coverage holes and to support disaster recovery and target area-monitoring missions. The performance of FANETs is affected by the typical issues with UAVs and limitations posed by areas of deployment. FANETs are a subset of the vehicular ad-hoc networks, however, due to typical issues of UAVs, the FANETs are complex in nature and need efficient resource allocation. Literature reveals that cooperative relaying techniques can significantly improve the capability of such ad-hoc networks. This article reviews the typical issues of UAV-based FANETs, their design principles, and resource allocation strategies that may be adopted to improve the system performance. Both buffers-aided and buffers-less cooperative relaying on FANETs are discussed in terms of the performance parameters.