Energy aware endurance framework for mission critical aerial networks

Recently, aerial networks have been offered as assistant communication infrastructures against some temporary operations especially in mission critical events. However, the lifetime of an aerial component is much less than the estimated operational time because of power supply capacity restrictions. Thus, there should be some replenishment processes between Aerial Base Stations (ABSs) to maintain the physical presence of the topology, i.e. the endurance. During a replenishment process, the relation between energy consumption and flight characteristic of a drone should be carefully taken in to account, because motional energy consumption is much more than the communicational and computational ones. For this purpose, we provide an energy aware endurance framework by modeling an energy consumption digraph model, representing an Aerial Pickup and Delivery Problem (APDP) for flight planning and implementing a novel algorithmic solution. Moreover, replenishment factor (γ) and flight planning cost (δ) parameters are presented to compare the evaluation of the proposed method with a simple replenishment approach. A social event in a stadium is selected as the evaluation environment, and is simulated for three scenarios using Software in the Loop (SITL) simulator with MAVLink Proxy drone controller. According to the evaluation results obtained from simulation logs, our design provides 13% more endurance per ABS (η), an average of 15% less energy consumption w.r.t. δ parameter and 11% less γ value compared to the simple replenishment strategy.