Evaluation of Potential Fields mobility strategies for aerial network provisioning

Abstract

In this research work we evaluate a Potential Fields based strategy for providing communication services from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to a moving crowd of users on the ground. In order to reach this goal we equip UAVs with cellular / WiFi femto cells. In our approach we organize the UAVs in a meshed topology to be robust towards failures and - when compared to centralized architectures - highly adaptive to changes in the (communication) environment. We use virtual Potential Fields to influence the UAVs' mobility behavior and keep the orthogonal requirements of ground area coverage and ground service provisioning time in optimal balance.