UAV-Assisted Mesh Network for Emergency Communication in Disaster Areas

In recent years, the spectrum of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) application has been growing largely. Their use is emerging from military sector to multiple other strategic civilian safety related sectors such as rescues, surveillance etc. In this paper, we aim to deploy a fleet of UAVs in disaster scenarios for providing communication network as an alternative when existing communication infrastructures are destroyed. For this purpose, the use of UAVs swarms as a wireless mesh network is recommended to provide connectivity to ground users enabling the communication between rescue teams. To ensure this, maintaining the stability of the swarm is a must especially that the UAVs are flying nodes and their mobility may impact connection stability. Moreover, they are energy restricted and uncontrolled mobility makes their batteries dries often. Therefore, we propose a new routing protocol called BR-OLSR using OLSR routing protocol for route computation and the boids of Reynolds, a kind of swarm intelligence, to maintain connectivity within the mesh network. We evaluated the performances of BR-OLSR through simulation and compared them to those of PSO-OLSR and classical OLSR protocols. The obtained results show that BR-OLSR remains closer to PSO-OLSR while it outperforms OLSR in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and energy consumption.