An Efficient Beam Scanning Scheme in Large-Scale FANETs with Directional Antennas

Directional Antennas have drawn some attention in flying ad-hoc networks (FANET). Most of the existing works consider only beam steering in a 2-dimensional plane. However, when the networks scale up to a coverage of hundreds of kilometers, some challenges emerge for the 2D methods. In this paper, we design a 3D beam scanning pattern and propose an efficient scanning strategy for the neighbor discovery process based on the analysis regarding the distance between nodes as well as the earth's curvature. Also, we fine-tune the pitch angle of the beam according to the scanner's altitude. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme in terms of neighbor discovery time.