Link quality dependent mobility strategies for distributed aerial sensor networks

Abstract

The in-depth reconnaissance and surveillance of incidents that are caused by uncontrolled emissions of liquid or gaseous contaminants, e.g. in cases of volcanic eruptions, large fires, industrial incidents or terrorist attacks, is still an emerging challenge. Mounting sensors on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is a feasible approach since recent advances in the area of propulsion, carbon reinforced materials and batteries enable for miniaturization and cost-efficient deployment. Our proposed system makes use of an autonomous, wireless connected swarm of Micro UAVs, that is featured with a lightweight mobile sensor system. For this purpose a mobile ad hoc remote sensing network is set up in the air, that allows for calculation of potential fields like a aerosol propagation maps or 3D geomorphologies. Next to this system-of-systems approach, we uniquely show how to optimize the spatial sensor coverage while maintaining the communication quality. In this paper we analyze the equilibrium between coverage and link quality for a cluster based mobility scheme which is combined with randomized cognitive repelling walks.