Title: Virtual backbone construction for large-scale ad hoc UAV networks

Authors: Hai Yu; Qin Liu; Hejiao Huang; Xiaohua Jia

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, China ' School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China ' Department of Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, China ' Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) technology has attracted great attention in recent years, and it has a wide range of applications. The communication among UAVs is a critical issue to support these applications. However, 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 neighbour information of UAVs. We also utilise the over-heard messages broadcast by the neighbouring 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 broadcast by each UAV and the completion time of the backbone construction. Simulation results also demonstrated that our proposed algorithm is efficient and effective.

Keywords: MANET; mobile ad hoc network; UAV; unmanned aerial vehicle; virtual backbone; clustering; routing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2019.103486

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2019 Vol.31 No.4, pp.216 - 225

Received: 15 Jun 2019
Accepted: 23 Jun 2019

Published online: 06 Nov 2019 *

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