Over the past decades, Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have achieved outstanding performance in military, commercial and civilian applications. UAVs are increasingly appearing in the form of swarms or formations to meet higher mission requirements. Communication plays an important role in UAV swarm control and coordination. The communication architecture defines how information is exchanged between UAVs or between UAVs and the central control center. Routing protocols help provide reliable end-to-end data transmission. Therefore, it is particularly important to design UAV swarm communication architectures and routing protocols with high performance and stability. This review article details four communication architectures including the advantages and disadvantages. Applicable scenarios are also discussed. In addition, a systematic overview and feasibility research of routing protocols are presented in this paper. To spur further research, the open research issues of UAV swarm communication architectures and routing protocols are also investigated.

The problem of collision avoidance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) group is studied in this paper. A collision avoidance method of UAV group formation based on second-order consensus algorithm and improved artificial potential field is proposed. Based on the method, the UAV group can form a predetermined formation from any initial state and fly to the target position in normal flight, and can avoid collision according to the improved smooth artificial potential field method when encountering an obstacle. The UAV group adopts the “leader–follower” strategy, that is, the leader UAV is the controller and flies independently according to the mission requirements, while the follower UAV follows the leader UAV based on the second-order consensus algorithm and formations gradually form during the flight. Based on the second-order consensus algorithm, the UAV group can achieve formation maintenance easily and the Laplacian matrix used in the algorithm is symmetric for an undirected graph. In the process of obstacle avoidance, the improved artificial potential field method can solve the jitter problem that the traditional artificial potential field method causes for the UAV and avoids violent jitter. Finally, simulation experiments of two scenarios were designed to verify the collision avoidance effect and formation retention effect of static obstacles and dynamic obstacles while the two UAV groups fly in opposite symmetry in the dynamic obstacle scenario. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently received notable attention because of their wide range of applications in urban civilian use and in warfare. With air traffic densities increasing, it is more and more important for UAVs to be able to predict and avoid collisions. The main goal of this research effort is to adjust real-time trajectories for cooperative UAVs to avoid collisions in three-dimensional airspace. To explore potential collisions, predictive state space is utilized to present the waypoints of UAVs in the upcoming situations, which makes the proposed method generate the initial collision-free trajectories satisfying the necessary constraints in a short time. Further, a rolling optimization algorithm (ROA) can improve the initial waypoints, minimizing its total distance. Several scenarios are illustrated to verify the proposed algorithm, and the results show that our algorithm can generate initial collision-free trajectories more efficiently than other methods in the common airspace.

In heterogeneous wireless networks, random packet loss and high latency lead to conventional TCP variants performing unsatisfactorily in the case of competing communications. Especially on high-latency wireless links, conventional TCP variants are unable to estimate congestion degrees accurately for fine-grained congestion control because of the effects of random packet loss and delay oscillations. This paper proposes a TCP variant at the sender side to identify congestion degrees, namely TCP-WBQ, which quickly responses to the real congestion and effectively shields against random packet loss and oscillations of latency time. The proposed algorithm of congestion control firstly constructs a backlog-queue model based on the dynamics of the congestion window, and deduces the two bounds of the model which delimit oscillations of the backlog queue for non-congestion and random packet loss respectively. TCP-WBQ detects congestion degrees more accurately and thus implements the corresponding schemes of adjusting the congestion window, maintaining a tradeoff between high throughputs and congestion avoidance. The comprehensive simulations show that TCP-WBQ works efficiently in bandwidth utilization with single and multiple bottleneck scenarios, and achieves high performance and competitive fairness in heterogeneous wireless networks.

No abstract

No abstract

The internal pressure and external stimulation contribute to focus on supply chain management in construction field. The construction engineering calls for research and practice of construction supply chain management. The paper comprehensively discusses on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. Combining with characteristics of construction supply chain, an improved DEA was brought out. The method divides overall into a series of core sub-systems. A supply chain relative performance evaluation model was provided based on network DEA. Integrated advantages of traditional DEA and network DEA, the overall performance and sub-process performance were evaluated respectively to achieve overall grasp and local control on construction supply chain evaluation.

Freeze drying is reported to be the best method of dehydration. Live fresh Chinese mitten crabs (Eriocheir sinensis) were freeze dried. The moisture content, rehydration ratio, and fatty acid composition of freeze-dried crabs were analysed. The applicability of using freeze drying to process high-value E. sinensis, so as to prolong the time duration of their storage and marketing, were discussed. After lyophilisation, the average moisture content was 6%. The physical properties (shape, size, and colour) of the musculature and viscera were maintained well during freeze drying. The rehydration ratio was 2.15 when rehydrated for 30 min at room temperature. The levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid, were higher in female freeze-dried crabs than in male crabs. After full rehydration, the fatty acid composition of freeze-dried crabs showed no significant differences to that of frozen crabs after thawing. In conclusion, freeze drying can well preserve the physical properties of the edible parts and fatty acid composition of the viscera in high-value E. sinensis. Rehydration has no destruction of the nutritional value regarding to the fatty acid composition. Therefore, freeze drying is a suitable technique for the processing of high-value E. sinensis.