Supporting seamless connectivity in drone-assisted intelligent transportation system

Abstract

Considering emergency scenarios for intelligent transportation applications, we propose a swarm of drones communication architecture that can sustain connectivity to assist the authorities for damage assessments. The connectivity sustenance needs stem from the fact that drones may move to various locations in response to service requests from the authorities but they still need to cooperate for data collection and transmissions. To address this need, we propose a centralized connectivity maintenance heuristic which will enable the swarm to dynamically adapt its formation in response to the service requests while ensuring uninterrupted live assessment reports. To select the moving drone(s), the minimum connected dominating set concept is utilized to come up with three strategies of mixed stretching or moving heuristic for the connectivity restoration. The proposed architecture and heuristics are implemented in ns- 3 network simulator and the effectiveness is tested in terms of providing undisturbed services under heavy multimedia traffic. The results indicate that the proposed approaches enable uninterrupted multimedia traffic delivery.