Abstract

UAVs in most real-world deployments communicate with a ground control station either in a one-hop manner, which has a limited working range, or relies on infrastructure support such as satellite communication, which is expensive. Although multi-hop transmission is more economic, it is lossy and generally incurs large delays. In this paper, we consider a mixed method, where a few UAVs are equipped with satellite modules, and aggregate and forward traffic of nearby UAVs. The surrounding UAVs and the forwarding UAV form a star topology. Based on this model, we design an UAV formation strategy to cover a given region to minimize both the total number of UAVs and the number of UAVs with satellite modules. Since these two goals may be competing, we propose seven strategies and analyze them theoretically. Simulations show that a good tradeoff between the two goals can be obtained when each star network consists of four UAVs.

中文翻译：

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星型拓扑无人机优化部署解决区域覆盖问题

摘要

在大多数现实世界部署中，无人机要么以单跳方式与地面控制站通信，这种方式的工作范围有限，要么依赖卫星通信等基础设施支持，但成本昂贵。虽然多跳传输更经济，但它是有损耗的，并且通常会产生较大的延迟。在本文中，我们考虑一种混合方法，其中少数无人机配备卫星模块，并聚合和转发附近无人机的流量。周围无人机与转发无人机形成星型拓扑。基于该模型，我们设计了覆盖给定区域的无人机编队策略，以最大限度地减少无人机总数和带有卫星模块的无人机数量。由于这两个目标可能是相互竞争的，我们提出了七种策略并进行了理论上的分析。模拟表明，当每个星形网络由四架无人机组成时，可以在两个目标之间取得良好的权衡。