A self-adaptive deployment model of UAV cluster for emergency communication network

Abstract

Equipped with micro wireless sensor nodes, a unmanned aerial vehicle) cluster can form an emergency communication network, which can have several applications such as environmental monitoring, disaster relief, military operations and so on. However, situations where there is excessive aggregation and small amount of dispersion of the unmanned aerial vehicle cluster may occur when the network is formed. To mitigate these, a solution based on a 3D virtual force driven by self-adaptive deployment (named as 3DVFSD) is proposed. As a result, the three virtual forces of central gravity, uniform force, and boundary constraint force are combined to act on each node of the communication network. By coordinating the distance between the nodes, especially the threshold of the distance between the boundary node and the boundary, the centralized nodes can be relatively dispersed. Meanwhile, the nodes can be prevented from being too scattered by constraining the distance from the boundary node to the end. The simulation results show that the 3DVFSD algorithm is superior to the traditional virtual force-driven deployment strategy in terms of convergence speed, coverage, and uniformity.