Emerging UAV technology for disaster detection, mitigation, response, and preparedness

Abstract

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant interest in research groups due to the wide range of applications, such as disaster surveillance and monitoring, rescue operations, military, civil, and so forth. UAVs are most often used to fulfill both user's services and requirements such as wireless communication facilities to end-users, as a relay node to extend the coverage of the core network, and so forth. UAVs are versatile in design and can cover larger areas, contrary to the Tethered Balloon and Loon Balloon systems. Generally in any natural or humanmade disaster, there is a high potential risk of damage to buildings, transport systems, communication systems, and basic services. During heavy disasters like landslides, forest fires, floods, earthquakes, and so forth, the conventional terrestrial communication system gets destroyed, and people face many problems. In this case, UAVs prove to offer a better solution to provide fast, cost-effective, easy to deploy, and secure wireless communication to the victims. But there are some issues like interference between UAVs and other base stations, coordination between UAVs, Quality of Service requirements, Size, Weight, and Power limitation, delay, coverage, positioning of UAVs, and so forth. This study article mainly highlighted these issues and try to present the recent developments of the state-of-the-art to overcome these issues. In UAV communications, with an increasing emphasis on how UAVs can be integrated with different technologies, such as the Internet of Things, Wireless Sensor Network, Heterogeneous Network, and Cloud computing. The primary aim of this article is to examine how UAVs can assist survivors in floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, or in any natural or human-made disaster situations, either in the present or soon. Also, it focused on various applications of UAVs in disaster management (DM). It underlines the significance of UAVs in DM and their advantages. It also focuses on the various issues and challenges faced by the UAV-based infrastructure and security issues and gives future directions.

Post-Disaster Communications: Enabling Technologies, Architectures, and Open Challenges

“…The authors of [19] presented another exciting survey on the role of large-scale 3D networks such as hybrid satelliteaerial-terrestrial networks in emergency scenarios, their architectures, trends, and challenges. General applications of UAVs in disaster management systems have been extensively reviewed and discussed in [20]. A more specific review on UAVs' path planning in smart cities affected by disasters has been recently proposed in [21], where several network security aspects are also considered.…”

“…Generally speaking, heterogeneity brings strengths and challenges at the same time. Integrating different communication technologies and protocols in the same system requires innovative research because each node type is designed to operate in specific environments and conditions and may not be compatible with different types [20,Sec. 7].…”

“…On the downside, if data are gathered from various sources (for example, sensors or social networks), then it is necessary to bridge any discrepancy or error before sharing. Modern technologies can already deal with this issue in ordinary occasions, but devising a similar framework for PDCs is much more challenging [20,Sec. 7].…”

“…UAVs for disaster management [20] Technologies for emergency communications [38] Paradigms, physical and networking layers, challenges This paper Recovery of terrestrial networks 2016 MDRUs [44] 2017 Mobile edge infrastructure, cyber-physical systems [42] 2018 Disaster assessment, data inventory, field situation recording/reporting [41] 2019 D2D and cellular systems [39] 4G-LTE, D2D, UAVs, MANETs, IoT [40] 2021 6G-NIB, maritime communications [43] Installation of aerial networks 2013 Helikites, 4G-LTE RRH [62] 2014 Balloons, monitoring [64] 2015 EVs, UAVs, area partitioning [49] DTN, topology, altitude [61] Balloons, satellites, relaying, deployment time [65] 2016 Coverage, relaying, information dissemination [50] UAVs, WSNs [46] Optimal placement, throughput [54] 2017 EANET, AODV, ZRP [59] 2018 Balloons, LiFi [63] Tethered balloons [66] UAVs, resilience, D2D, power control [47] Implementation of PSO algorithm [51] 2019 Trajectory, scheduling, transceiver design [53] Transceiver design, routing, D2D [58] Heterogeneous networks (HetNets), routing, resource allocation [68] DTN, LoRa [60] 2020…”

Communication Energy Optimization of UAV-assisted WSN Data Transmission

“…With the advancement of UAV technology, UAVassisted WSN communication has become a popular research topic, utilizing the flexibility of UAV flight and the stability of air-ground communication links. For example, UAV-assisted WSN data collection can achieve animal activity tracking or meteorological environment parameter monitoring in complex mountainous terrain [2].…”