Cooperative Spatial Retreat for Resilient Drone Networks

Abstract

Drones are broadening their scope to various applications such as networking, package delivery, agriculture, rescue, and many more. For proper operation of drones, reliable communication should be guaranteed because drones are remotely controlled. When drones experience communication failure due to bad channel condition, interference, or jamming in a certain area, one existing solution is to exploit mobility or so-called spatial retreat to evacuate them from the communication failure area. However, the conventional spatial retreat scheme moves drones in random directions, which results in inefficient movement with significant evacuation time and waste of battery lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial retreat technique that takes advantage of cooperation between drones for resilient networking, which is called cooperative spatial retreat (CSR). Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed CSR significantly outperforms existing schemes. © 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.