UAV-Assisted Supporting Services Connectivity in Urban VANETs

Abstract

To keep the services and applications of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) stable and active, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are considered as an essential building block to maintain and manage its features. A wide deployment of VANETs is possible only after addressing numerous research challenges. One of the most complicated issues consists in designing a routing strategy, taking into consideration several serious constraints, and especially in a network such as VANET. The severity of these issues would be increased significantly when a VANET is deployed over an urban area, where we distinguish the high mobility of nodes and existing obstructions (e.g., buildings, bridges, tunnels, etc.). In this paper, an efficient routing solution based on a flooding technique is conceived to make the data delivery more reliable and to guarantee robust paths. Vehicles can cooperate in ad hoc fashion with existing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This kind of collaboration provides reliable routing paths and ensures alternative solutions in the case of path failures. Furthermore, a prediction technique is used to expect the expiration time of each discovered path. To limit the overhead over the network, all control packets are characterized by their static size making the originality of this work. Based on the simulation outputs, we discuss the performances of the proposed approach as compared with other dedicated previous schemes in terms of several metrics. The obtained results demonstrate that the hybrid communication between vehicles and UAVs based on the proposed flooding technique is perfectly suited to improve the data delivery process.

Unmanned aerial vehicle for internet of everything: Opportunities and challenges

“…For the areas with weak-connection, we list four typical regions that are construction sites in urban, disaster regions in urban, blind coverage spots in the city, and the transportation road. In these areas, some recent studies use UAVs to offer an extended network coverage and perform some specified applications such Areas with weak-connection Urban construction sites Construction project management [119]- [121] Indoor construction monitoring [122], [123] Disaster regions Disaster surveillance [80], [124], [125] Emergency networks construction [126]- [129] Urban coverage blind spots Enhanced coverage in urban area [29], [80], [130]- [133] Patrolling and surveillance [134]- [139] Transportation systems Intelligent transportation systems [140]- [143] Connection between ground vehicles [144]- [147] Areas without network deployment Farms Survey of UAV in agriculture [63], [148] Imagery analysis of crops [149]- [153] Deserts Disaster monitoring [154]- [156] Geomorphological analysis [61], [155], [157] Military detection [158] Forests Trees and plants monitoring [159]- [162] Forest growing volume prediction [163], [164] Oceans Coastal environment analysis [165]- [168] Ocean environment monitoring [169]- [171] Marine science and observation [18]...…”

“…Optimizing the position and trajectory [126], [128], [133], [144], [176] Intelligent network layer Routing selection [15], [69], [89] Congestion control [177]- [181] Smart access [182], [183] Intelligent application layer High-level control [184]- [187] UAV-enabled intelligent aerial services…”

Routing Schemes in FANETs: A Survey

“…Consequently, there are frequent link disconnections and network partitions, which increase route discovery and maintenance, resulting in lower routing performance. Various mobility models (see Section 2.4) of UAVs has been designed to investigate routing [104]. X.…”

“…Frequent link disconnections and network partitions can increase route discovery and maintenance to reestablish routes as well as increase packet retransmission [133]. Consequently, network performance degrades, which can be unacceptable in critical circumstances, such as disaster relief and rescue operations [104,134]. There are two main challenges in improving network connectivity: a) high dynamicity (X.1) of network topology and b) high cost (X.2) due to increased routing overhead, energy consumption, and computational cost.…”

“…This increases route discovery and maintenance to reestablish routes, as well as packet retransmission, resulting in higher cost (X.2) [133]. Consequently, network performance degrades, which can be unacceptable in critical circumstances, such as during disaster relief and rescue operations [104,134]. Both high and low altitude platforms can be used.…”