A Survey of Flying Ad-Hoc Networks: Characteristics and Challenges

Abstract

This paper mainly concerned with a survey of Flying Ad-Hoc networks (FANETs). FANET, which defined as a new Ad-Hoc network family between Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), has attracted great interests between industry and academy in the past few years. Rather than the traditional mobile Ad-Hoc networks (MANETs) and vehicular Ad-Hoc networks (VANETs), the nodes in FANET have some new features, such as Line-of-sight (LoS) dominated radio propagation channel, higher mobility, and more rapidly changing network topology. Due to these specific characteristics, the classic communication methods on fixed networks and slowly moving networks may not be feasible. The challenges in FANET design characteristics and communication protocols have been proposed. Moreover, the open research issues have been also discussed.