Autonomous Mobile Drone Mesh Networks

The popularity of drones has grown rapidly, and this increasing popularity has inspired numerous attractive applications, such as aerial photography, environment monitoring, rescue, tracking, and terrain modeling. Most of existing applications, however, still rely on single or multiple drones operating independently. One might look forward to more exciting applications if multiple drones can form clusters and cooperate with each other to broaden their coverage and capability. A practical challenge is how to connect those drones as a self-organizing wireless network as they move to accomplish the assigned task and change the topology dynamically over time. Mesh networks is usually thought of a preferable choice as a self-organizing structure because of its scalability, reliability, efficiency and low maintenance cost as compared to ad-hoc networks. However, traditional mesh networks are usually constructed as a fixed infrastructure that serves mobile devices locating nearby. Such a static infrastructure can hardly support drones, which are usually highly dynamic and fly around a large terrain. In this talk, I will introduce a new class of mesh networks called Autonomous Mobile Mesh Network (AMMNET). Unlike conventional meshes, the mobile mesh nodes of an AMMNET are capable of following the drones in the application terrain, while organizing themselves into a suitable network topology to ensure good connectivity. AMMNET's mobile infrastructure can hence serve highly-dynamic drones and enable reliable team collaboration.