Abstract:
Considering post-disaster scenarios for intelligent
traffic management and damage assessment where communication
infrastructure may not be available, we advocate a swarmof-
drones mesh communication architecture that can sustain
in-network connectivity among drones. The connectivity sustenance
requirement stems from the fact that drones may move
to various locations in response to service requests but they
still need to cooperate for data collection and transmissions.
To address this need, we propose a fully distributed connectivity
maintenance heuristic which enables the swarm to quickly adapt
its formation in response to the service requests. To select
the moving drone(s) that would bring minimal overhead in
terms of time and moving distance, the connected dominating
set (CDS) concept from graph theory is utilized. Specifically,
a variation of CDS, namely E-CDS, is introduced to address
the needs of 3-D mobile swarm-of-drones. We then show that
E-CDS is NP-Complete and propose a new distributed heuristic
to solve it. Once the E-CDS is determined in advance, drones
not part of this E-CDS set are picked for movement tasks.
When the movement is to cause any disconnection with the
rest of the swarm, other drones are also relocated to restore
the connectivity. The proposed heuristics are implemented in ns-
3 network simulator as part of the existing IEEE 802.11s mesh
standard and the effectiveness is tested in terms of providing
undisturbed services under different conditions. The results
indicate that the proposed distributed heuristic almost matches
the performance of a centralized solution and suits perfectly the
needs of post-disaster traffic management.
