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Relying on multi-hop communication techniques, aeronautical ad hoc networks (AANETs) seamlessly integrate ground base stations (BSs) and satellites into aircraft communications for enhancing the on-demand connectivity of planes in the air. In this integrated AANET context we investigate the shortest-path routing problem with the objective of minimizing the total delay of the in-flight connection from the ground BS subject to certain minimum-rate constraints for all selected links in support of low-latency and high-speed services. Inspired by the best-first search and priority queue concepts, we model the problem formulated by a weighted digraph and find the optimal route based on the shortest-path algorithm. Our simulation results demonstrate that aircraft-aided multi-hop communications are capable of reducing the total delay of satellite communications, when relying on real historical flight data.
Interference between nodes directly limits the capacity of mobile ad hoc networks. This paper focuses on spatial interference cancelation with perfect channel state information (CSI), and analyzes the corresponding network capacity. Specifically, by using multiple antennas, zero-forcing beamforming is applied at each receiver for canceling the strongest interferers. Given spatial interference cancelation, the network transmission capacity is analyzed in this paper, which is defined as the maximum transmitting node density under constraints on outage and the signal-to-interference-noise ratio. Assuming the Poisson distribution for the locations of network nodes and spatially i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels, mathematical tools from stochastic geometry are applied for deriving scaling laws for transmission capacity. Specifically, for small target outage probability, transmission capacity is proved to increase following a power law, where the exponent is the inverse of the size of antenna array or larger depending on the pass loss exponent. As shown by simulations, spatial interference cancelation increases transmission capacity by an order of magnitude or more even if only one extra antenna is added to each node.
This paper reports experimental results on self-organizing wireless networks carried by small flying robots. Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) composed of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are flexible, inexpensive and fast to deploy. This makes them a very attractive technology for many civilian and military applications. Due to the high mobility of the nodes, maintaining a communication link between the UAVs is a challenging task. The topology of these networks is more dynamic than that of typical mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and of typical vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs). As a consequence, the existing routing protocols designed for MANETs partly fail in tracking network topology changes. In this work, we compare two different routing algorithms for ad hoc networks: optimized link-state routing (OLSR), and predictive-OLSR (P-OLSR). The latter is an OLSR extension that we designed for FANETs; it takes advantage of the GPS information available on board. To the best of our knowledge, P-OLSR is currently the only FANET-specific routing technique that has an available Linux implementation. We present results obtained by both Media Access Control (MAC) layer emulations and real-world experiments. In the experiments, we used a testbed composed of two autonomous fixed-wing UAVs and a node on the ground. Our experiments evaluate the link performance and the communication range, as well as the routing performance. Our emulation and experimental results show that P-OLSR significantly outperforms OLSR in routing in the presence of frequent network topology changes.
In this paper, we introduce a network-decomposed hierarchical cooperation (HC) protocol and completely characterize the corresponding throughput--delay trade-off for a large wireless ad hoc network formed in the context of social relationships. Instead of randomly picking source--destination pairings, we first consider a distance-based social formation model characterized by the social group density $gamma$ and the number of social contacts per node, $q$, where the probability that any two nodes in distance $d$ away from each other are socially connected is assumed to be proportional to $d^{-gamma}$, which is a feasible scenario. Then, using muiltihop and network-decomposed HC protocols under our social formation model, we analyze a generalized throughput--delay trade-off according to the operating regimes with respect to parameters $gamma$ and $q$ in both a dense network of unit area and an extended network of unit node density via a non-straightforward network transformation strategy. Our main results reveal that as $gamma$ increases, performance on the throughput--delay trade-off can remarkably be improved, compared to the network case with no social relationships. It is also shown that in the dense network, the network-decomposed HC protocol always outperforms the multihop protocol, while the superiority of the network-decomposed HC depends on $gamma$ and the path-loss exponent in the extended network.
Cognitive radio (CR) technology will have significant impacts on upper layer performance in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, we study topology control and routing in CR-MANETs. We propose a distributed Prediction-based Cognitive Topology Control (PCTC) scheme to provision cognition capability to routing in CR-MANETs. PCTC is a midware-like cross-layer module residing between CR module and routing. The proposed PCTC scheme uses cognitive link availability prediction, which is aware of the interference to primary users, to predict the available duration of links in CR-MANETs. Based on the link prediction, PCTC constructs an efficient and reliable topology, which is aimed at mitigating re-routing frequency and improving end-to-end network performance such as throughput and delay. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
The engineering vision of relying on the ``smart sky for supporting air traffic and the ``Internet above the clouds for in-flight entertainment has become imperative for the future aircraft industry. Aeronautical ad hoc Networking (AANET) constitutes a compelling concept for providing broadband communications above clouds by extending the coverage of Air-to-Ground (A2G) networks to oceanic and remote airspace via autonomous and self-configured wireless networking amongst commercial passenger airplanes. The AANET concept may be viewed as a new member of the family of Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) in action above the clouds. However, AANETs have more dynamic topologies, larger and more variable geographical network size, stricter security requirements and more hostile transmission conditions. These specific characteristics lead to more grave challenges in aircraft mobility modeling, aeronautical channel modeling and interference mitigation as well as in network scheduling and routing. This paper provides an overview of AANET solutions by characterizing the associated scenarios, requirements and challenges. Explicitly, the research addressing the key techniques of AANETs, such as their mobility models, network scheduling and routing, security and interference are reviewed. Furthermore, we also identify the remaining challenges associated with developing AANETs and present their prospective solutions as well as open issues. The design framework of AANETs and the key technical issues are investigated along with some recent research results. Furthermore, a range of performance metrics optimized in designing AANETs and a number of representative multi-objective optimization algorithms are outlined.