Online-Relaying-Based Image Communication in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

Kevon Scott, Rui Dai, Junjie Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The use of small and miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for remote sensing and surveillance applications has become increasingly popular in the last two decades. The intermittent connectivity in a sparse UAV network makes it challenging to efficiently gather sensed image data. This paper investigates the communication of sensed images from a set of mobile survey UAVs to a static base station through the assistance of a relay UAV. Given the planned routes of survey UAVs, a set of relay waypoints are found for the relay UAV to meet the survey UAVs and receive the sensed images. An Online Message Relaying technique (OMR) is proposed to schedule the relay UAV to collect images. Without any global collaboration between the relay UAV and the survey UAVs, OMR utilizes a markov decision process (MDP) that determines the best schedules for the relay UAV such that the image acquisition rate could be maximized. Evaluation results show that the proposed relaying technique outperforms traditional relaying techniques, such as the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and the random walk, in terms of end-to-end delay and frame delivery ratio.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
EditorsMerouane Debbah, David Gesbert, Abdelhamid Mellouk
PublisherIEEE
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4673-8999-0
ISBN (Print)978-1-4673-9000-2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 31 2017
Event2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2017 - Paris, France
Duration: May 21 2017May 25 2017

Conference

Conference2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2017
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityParis
Period5/21/175/25/17

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Keywords

  • Relays
  • Unmanned aerial vehicles
  • Trajectory
  • Sensors
  • Delays
  • Quality of service
  • Mobile nodes

Disciplines

  • Computer Sciences
  • Engineering

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