Cooperative Distributed Unmanned Aerial Vehicular Networksï1⁄4ıSmall and Mini Drones.dvi

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been widely used both in military and in civilian applications. However, the cooperation of small and mini drones in a network is capable of further improving both the performance and the coverage area of UAVs. Naturally, there are numerous new challenges to be solved before the wide-spread introduction of multi-UAV based heterogeneous Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET), including the formulation of a stable network structure. Meanwhile, an efficient gateway selection algorithm and management mechanism is required as well. On the other hand, the stability control of the hierarchical UAV network guarantees the efficient collaboration of the drones. In this article, we commence with surveying the FANET structure and its protocol architecture. Then, a variety J. Wang, C. Jiang and Y. Ren are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. E-mail: [email protected], {jchx, reny}@tsinghua.edu.cn. Z. Han is with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department as well as Computer Science Department, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA. Email: [email protected]. R. G. Maunder and L. Hanzo are with the School of Electronic and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ U.K. This work was partly funded by project 61371079, 61273214 and 61271267 supported by NSFC China, National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under grants 2013CB3291005 and Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project. R. Maunder and L Hanzo would also like to acknocwledge the TSB-funded HARNet project TS/L009390/1. Finally, L. Hanzo would like to gratefully acknowledge the fiscal support of the European Research Council’s Beam-me-aup project. Published in the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine. Since this is a conceptual magazine paper, there is no research data for it. December 21, 2016 DRAFT