An Efficient and Low-Cost Hierarchical FANET Architecture Using the Attached Mobility Model to Create the Core Layer for Connecting UAVs and Ground Control Stations

Abstract

Due to the frequent movement of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Flying Ad-Hoc Network (FANET), increasing the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) from the UAVs to the Ground Control Station (GCS) is a major problem. In this research, a solution is suggested, which has been enhanced from standard Unmanned aerial Vehicle (UAV) to address this challenge. The idea of the proposed solution is to create a two-layer hierarchical FANET, core and access layers. The core layer consists of several UAVs flying according to the attached mobility model to form a backbone connecting to the GCS. The access layer includes the remaining UAVs that use the core layer UAVs as gateways to transmit data to the GCS. The proposed solution is compared with the improved architecture in term of PDR, throughput, and end-to-end-delay. Simulation results conducted using OMNeT++ demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the improved architecture in the evaluated performance metrics.