Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, a flying platform, are a promising wireless communications infrastructure with wide-ranging applications in both commercial and military domain. Owing to the appealing characteristics, such as high mobility, high feasibility, and low cost, UAV networks can be applied in various scenarios, such as emergency communications, cellular networks, device-to-device (D2D) networks, and sensor networks, regardless of infrastructure and spatial constraints. To handle complicated missions, provide wireless coverage for a large range, and have a long lifetime, a UAV network may consist of a large amount of UAVs, working cooperatively as a swarm, also referred to as swarm UAV networks. Although high mobility and numerous UAVs offer high flexibility, high scalability, and performance enhancement for swarm UAV networks, they also incur some technical challenges. One of the major challenges is the routing protocol design. With high mobility, a dynamic network topology may be encountered. As a result, traditional routing protocols based on routing path discovery are not applicable in swarm UAV networks, as the discovered routing path may be outdated especially when the amount of UAVs is large causing considerable routing path discovery delay. Multicast is an essential and key technology in the scenarios, where swarm UAV networks are employed as aerial small base station (BSs), like relay or micro BS. Swarm UAV networks consisting of a large amount of UAVs will encounter severe multicast delay with existing multicast methods using acknowledgement (ACK) feedback and retransmissions. This issue will be deteriorated when a swarm UAV network is deployed far away from BSs, causing high packet loss. Data exchange is another major technical challenge in swarm UAV networks, where UAVs exchange data packets with each other, such as requesting and retrieving lost packets. Due to numerous UAVs, data exchange between UAVs can cause message and signaling storm, resulting in a long data exchange delay and severe ovehead. In this dissertation, I focus on developing novel routing protocols, multicast schemes, and data exchange schemes, enabling efficient, robust, and high-performance routing, multicast, and data exchange in swarm UAV networks. To be specific, two novel flooding-based routing protocols are designed in this dissertation, where random network coding (RNC) is utilized to improve the efficiency of the flooding-based routing in swarm UAV networks without relying on network topology information and routing path discovery. Using the property of RNC that as long as sufficient different versions of encoded packets/generations are accumulated, original packets could be decoded, RNC is naturally able to accelerate the routing process. This is because the use of RNC can reduce the number of encoded packets that are required to be delivered in some hop. In a hop, the receiver UAV may have already overheard some generations in previous hops, so that it only needs to receive fewer generations from the transmitter UAV in the current hop. To further expedite the flooding-based routing, the second flooding-based routing protocol is designed, where each forwarding UAV creates a new version of generation by linearly combining received generations rather than by decode original packets. Despite the flooding-based routing significantly hastened by RNC, the inherent drawback of the flooding-based routing is still unsolved, namely numerous hops. Aiming at reducing the amount of hops, a novel enhanced flooding-based routing protocol leveraging clustering is designed, where the whole UAV network will be partitioned into multiple clusters and in each cluster only one UAV will be selected as the representative of this cluster, participating in the flooding-based routing process. By this way, the number of hops is restricted by the number of representatives, since packets are only flooded between limited representatives rather than numerous UAVs. To address the multicast issue in swarm UAV networks, a novel multicast scheme is proposed based on clustering, where a UAV experiencing packet loss will retrieve the lost packets by requesting other UAVs in the same cluster without depending on retransmissions of BSs. In this way, the lost packet retrieval is carried out through short-distance data exchange between UAVs with reliable transmissions and a short delay. Tractable stochastic geometry tools are used to model swarm UAV networks with a dynamic network topology, based on which comprehensive analytical performance analysis is given. To enable efficient data exchange between UAVs in swarm UAV networks, a data exchange scheme is proposed utilizing unsupervised learning. With the proposed scheme, all UAVs are assigned to multiple clusters and a UAV can only carry out data exchange within its cluster. By this way, UAVs in different clusters perform data exchange in a parallel fashion to expedite data exchange. The agglomerative hierarchical clustering, a type of unsupervised learning, is used to conduct clustering in order to guarantee that UAVs in the same cluster are able to supply and supplement each other's lost packets. Additionally, a data exchange mechanism, including a novel random backoff procedure, is designed, where the priorities of UAVs in data exchange determined by the number of their lost packets or requested packets that they can provide. As a result, each request-reply process would be taken fully advantage, maximally supplying lost packets not only to the UAV sending request, but also to other UAVs in the same cluster. For all the developed technologies in this dissertation, their technical details and the corresponding system procedures are designed based on low-complexity and well-developed technologies, such as the carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), for practicability in practice and without loss of generality. Moreover, extensive simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed and developed technologies. Additionally, system design insights are also explored and revealed through simulations. / Doctor of Philosophy / Compared to fixed infrastructures in wireless communications, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks possess some significant advantages, such as low cost, high mobility, and high feasibility, making UAV networks have a wide range of applications in both military and commercial fields. However, some characteristics of UAV networks, including dynamic network topology and numerous UAVs, may become technical barriers for wireless communications. One of the major challenges is the routing protocol design. Routing is the process of selecting a routing path, enabling data delivered from a node (source) to another desired node (destination). Traditionally, routing is performed based on routing path discovery, where control packets are broadcasted and the path, on which a control packet first reaches the destination, will be selected as routing path. However, in UAV networks, routing path discovery may experience a long delay, as control packets go through many UAVs. Besides, the discovered routing path may be outdated, as the topology of UAV networks change over time. Another key technology in wireless communications that may not work well in UAV networks is multicast, where a transmitter, like a base station (BS), broadcasts data to UAVs and all UAVs are required to receive this data. With numerous UAVs, multicast delay may be severe, since the transmitter will keep retransmitting a data packet to UAVs until all UAVs successfully receive the packet. This issue will be deteriorated when a UAV network is deployed far away from BSs, causing high packet loss. Data exchange between UAVs is a fundamental and important system procedure in UAV networks. A large amount of UAV in a UAV network will cause serious data exchange delay, as many UAVs have to compete for limited wireless resources to request or send data. In this dissertation, I focus on developing novel technologies and schemes for swarm UAV networks, where a large amount of UAVs exist to make UAV networks powerful and handle complicated missions, enable efficient, robust, and high-performance routing, multicast, and data exchange system procedures. To be specific, two novel flooding-based routing protocols are designed, where random network coding (RNC) is utilized to improve the efficiency of flooding-based routing without relying on any network topology information or routing path discovery. The use of RNC could naturally expedite flooding-based routing process. With RNC, a receiver can decode original packets as long as it accumulates sufficient encoded packets, which may be sent by different transmitters in different hops. As a result, in some hops, fewer generations may be required to be transmitted, as receivers have already received and accumulated some encoded in previous hops. To further improve the efficiency of flooding-based routing, another routing protocol using RNC is designed, where UAVs create new encoded packets by linearly combining received encoded packets rather than linearly combing original packets. Apparently, this method would be more efficient. UAVs do not need to collect sufficient encoded packets and decode original packets, while only linearly combining all received encoded packets. Although RNC could effectively improve the efficiency of flooding-based routing, the inherent drawback is still unsolved, which is a large amount of hops caused by numerous UAVs. Thus, an enhanced flooding-based routing protocol using clustering is designed, where the whole UAV network will be partitioned into multiple clusters. In each cluster only one UAV will be selected as the representative of this cluster, participating in the flooding-based routing process. By this way, the number of hops could be greatly reduced, as packets are only flooded between limited representatives rather than numerous UAVs. To address the multicast issue in swarm UAV networks, a novel multicast scheme is proposed, where a UAV experiencing packet loss will retrieve its lost packets by requesting other UAVs in the same cluster without depending on retransmissions of BSs. In this way, the lost packet retrieval is carried out through short-distance data exchange between UAVs with reliable transmissions and a short delay. Then, the optimal number of clusters and the performance of the proposed multicast scheme are investigated by tractable stochastic geometry tools. If all UAVs closely stay together in a swarm UAV network, long data exchange delay would be significant technical issue, since UAVs will cause considerable interference to each other and all UAVs will compete for spectrum access. To cope with that, a data exchange scheme is proposed leveraging unsupervised learning. To avoid interference between UAVs and a long-time waiting for spectrum access, all UAVs are assigned to multiple clusters and different clusters use different frequency bands to carry out data exchange simultaneously. The agglomerative hierarchical clustering, a type of unsupervised learning, is used to conduct clustering, guaranteeing that UAVs in the same cluster are able to supply and supplement each other's lost packets. Additionally, a data exchange mechanism is designed, facilitating that a UAV with more lost packets or more requested packets has a higher priority to carry out data exchange. In this way, each request-reply process would be taken fully advantage, maximally supplying lost packets not only to the UAV sending request, but also to other UAVs in the same cluster. For all the developed technologies in this dissertation, their technical details and the corresponding system procedures are designed based on low-complexity and well-developed technologies, such as the carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), for practicability in reality and without loss of generality. Moreover, extensive simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the developed technologies. Additionally, system design insights are also explored and revealed through simulations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/109752 |
| Date | 24 March 2021 |
| Creators | Song, Hao |
| Contributors | Electrical Engineering, Liu, Lingjia, Zuo, Lei, Yang, Yaling, Zeng, Haibo, Dhillon, Harpreet Singh |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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