Simulation study of unmanned aerial vehicle communication networks addressing bandwidth disruptions

Abstract

To date, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used for numerous applications. UAVs can directly connect to ground stations or satellites to transfer data. Multiple UAVs can communicate and cooperate with each other and then construct an ad-hoc network. Multi-UAV systems have the potential to provide reliable and timely services for end users in addition to satellite networks. In this paper, we conduct a simulation study for evaluating the network performance of multi-UAV systems and satellite networks using the ns-2 networking simulation tool. Our simulation results show that UAV communication networks can achieve better network performance than satellite networks and with a lower cost and increased timeliness. We also investigate security resiliency of UAV networks. As a case study, we simulate false data injection attacks against UAV communication networks in ns-2 and demonstrate the impact of false data injection attacks on network performance.