Computer Science Faculty, Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Belém 66075-110, Brazil.
Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas 13083-970, Brazil.
Sensors (Basel). 2018 Nov 27;18(12):4155. doi: 10.3390/s18124155.
Collaboration between multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to set up a Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET) is a growing trend since future applications claim for more autonomous and rapid deployable systems. The user experience on watching videos transmitted over FANETs should always be satisfactory even under influence of topology changes caused by the energy consumption of UAVs. In addition, the FANET must keep the UAVs cooperating as much as possible during a mission. However, one of the main challenges in FANET is how to mitigate the impact of limited energy resources of UAVs on the FANET operation in order to monitor the environment for a long period of time. In this sense, UAV replacement is required in order to avoid the premature death of nodes, network disconnections, route failures, void areas, and low-quality video transmissions. In addition, decision-making must take into account energy consumption associated with UAV movements, since they are generally quite energy-intensive. This article proposes a cooperative UAV scheme for enhancing video transmission and global energy efficiency called VOEI. The main goal of VOEI is to maintain the video with QoE support while supporting the nodes with a good connectivity quality level and flying for a long period of time. Based on an Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm, the VOEI assumes the existence of a centrailized controller node to compute reliable and energy-efficiency routes, as well as detects the appropriate moment for UAV replacement by considering global FANET context information to provide energy-efficiency operations. Based on simulation results, we conclude that VOEI can effectively mitigate the energy challenges of FANET, since it provides energy-efficiency operations, avoiding network death, route failure, and void area, as well as network partitioning compared to state-of-the-art algorithm. In addition, VOEI delivers videos with suitable Quality of Experience (QoE) to end-users at any time, which is not achieved by the state-of-the-art algorithm.
多架无人机 (UAV) 协作组建飞行自组织网络 (FANET) 是一种日益增长的趋势，因为未来的应用需要更自主和快速可部署的系统。即使在无人机能耗引起的拓扑变化的影响下，用户在观看 FANET 传输的视频时的体验也应该始终是令人满意的。此外，FANET 必须在任务期间尽可能保持无人机之间的协作。然而，FANET 的主要挑战之一是如何减轻无人机有限能源资源对 FANET 运行的影响，以便长时间监测环境。在这种情况下，需要更换无人机，以避免节点过早死亡、网络中断、路由故障、空洞区域和低质量视频传输。此外，决策必须考虑与无人机运动相关的能耗，因为它们通常非常耗能。本文提出了一种名为 VOEI 的增强视频传输和全局能效的协作无人机方案。VOEI 的主要目标是在支持节点具有良好连接质量水平的同时，保持视频的服务质量 (QoE) 支持，并支持长时间飞行。基于软件定义网络 (SDN) 范例，VOEI 假设存在一个集中控制器节点来计算可靠和节能的路由，以及通过考虑全局 FANET 上下文信息来检测更换无人机的适当时刻，以提供节能操作。基于仿真结果，我们得出结论，VOEI 可以有效地缓解 FANET 的能源挑战，因为它提供节能操作，避免了网络死亡、路由故障和空洞区域以及与现有算法相比的网络分区。此外，VOEI 能够在任何时候向最终用户提供具有适当体验质量 (QoE) 的视频，这是现有算法无法实现的。
