Measurement of Air-Ground link over Virtual Forces Algorithm For Autonomous Aerial Drone Systems, VBCA

Abstract

With recent technological advances, the capabilities of UAVs have rapidly increased and their use and role in society have also changed from the military to the civilian domain. Many studies have been made for the collaboration of several UVAS to accomplish a mission. But most of the studies done on the subject of FANET do not propose any overall approach to the network itself and remain fragmented, generally based on the final mission. The solutions proposed are not reproducible on other missions. This aspect pushes us to propose a solution independent of the mission and easily reproducible. Otherwise the positioning of nodes in FANETs can provide a mission-independent response. Reason why the solutions for positioning network nodes are numerous. One in particular offers a comprehensive and interesting approach. It is VBCA. This method has the particularity of positioning the nodes in 3-D. In general, the 3-D positioning becomes an NP-Hard problem. But with VBCA positioning is relatively simple. In this paper we present an optimization of communication in a topology based on the VBCA (Virtual forces Based Clustering Algorithm). The topology is optimized by the VBCA algorithm for a better coverage area. This method is 40% more efficient than existing approaches in terms of area coverage. In the first versions of VBCA, the performances in terms of communication between nodes have not been tested. The resulting network performances are very encouraging, in terms of throughput, delay, packets loss and signal strength. Therefore, this work provides a first answer to the performances in terms of network.