STFANET: SDN-Based Topology Management for Flying Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

In recent years, with the growth in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), UAV-based systems have become popular in both military and civil applications. The lack of reliable communication infrastructure in these scenarios has motivated the use of UAVs to establish a network as flying nodes, also known as Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs). However, the high mobility degree of flying and terrestrial users may be responsible for constant changes in the network topology, which makes more challenging to guarantee their communication during the operational time. In this context, this article presents a Software-defined networking (SDN) based Topology management for FANETs-called of STFANET-, which is a coordination protocol that englobes both an efficient SDN-based UAV communication and a set of topology management algorithms. The goal is to establish and maintain a FANET topology in order to provide a constant and reliable communication link among independent nodes-which are performing individual or collaborative missions-through relays units. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed protocol in order to provide communication in a dynamic scenario. Considering its use in a military setting, STFANET managed to achieve 25% of packet loss in transmitting data packets, 1.5ms of latency and 71% of connectivity on average. INDEX TERMS FANET, topology management, relay node placement, SDN, communication protocol.

A mean field game-theoretic cross-layer optimization for multi-hop swarm UAV communications

“…Typically, network resource management has been widely studied, which is always described as a constrained optimization problem with a specific utility function or cost function [10]. The FANET resource management problem involves more complex aspects: rate allocation, bandwidth allocation, power control, frequency scheduling, access control, topology management, routing, or end-to-end quality of service [11]. It aims to allocate network resources dynamically, improve network performance, maximize network utility and provide end-to-end quality of service under the conditions of low latency, time-varying channel, finite bandwidth, and dynamic topology [12].…”

Softwarization of UAV Networks: A Survey of Applications and Future Trends

“…SDN-based UAV networks have recently attracted the interest of scientific researchers and industry [178]. The SDN architecture aims to flexibly manage UAV networks [179].…”

ASR-FANET: An adaptive SDN-based routing framework for FANET

“…An SDN controller is used to calculate the routes and to monitor information with regards to the network. The main goal of this scheme is to decrease the latency, and increase the throughput Silva et al [18] exploited the SDN to maintain the topology of FANET. The primary purpose of this protocol is to define and modify the topology so as to maintain the connection between the independent nodes via the relay nodes.…”