Handover Management of Net-Drones for Future Internet Platforms

Abstract

The advent of the Internet of things (IoT) is changing the way how we interact with the physical world. However, the current Internet suffers from exponential increase in bandwidth demand. In order to resolve the bandwidth issue, we can consider aerial networks by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or the so-called drones for establishing a three-dimensional mobile network in an ad hoc manner. By deploying a network from the sky, we can use the otherwise idle wireless medium and high mobility free from ground obstacles. Aerial networks are especially effective for supporting the temporary surge of population as well as disaster areas because building an additional network infrastructure requires extensive time. In this paper, we propose an efficient handover mechanism for aerial networks in the three-dimensional space, which significantly differs from the conventional two-dimensional schemes. The proposed scheme adjusts the height of a drone and the distance between the drones. To this end, we use the seamless handover success probability and the false handover initiation probability in order to evaluate the optimal coverage decision algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first attempt for resolving handover of net-drones in the three-dimensional space. © 2016 Kyung-Nam Park et al.