Utilization Of Directional Antennas In Flying Ad Hoc Networks: Challenges And Design Guidelines

Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are designed and used to free human beings from dirty, dull, and dangerous missions. A UAV is defined as a system that can fly autonomously or is remotely piloted. For the last two decades, UAVs have been widely used for both military and civilian missions. Although single-UAV systems have been successfully implemented and used in aviation so far, multi-UAV missions are gaining interest in the research community. Hence, there is a tendency to utilize a group of smaller and cheaper UAVs instead. Most of the arising communication problems can be mitigated with the deployment of directional antennas. However, to the best of our knowledge, the substitution of a single UAV-based mission is not handled thoroughly in the literature yet.Today, the novel ad hoc network formed by UAVs up in the sky is called as flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) which bear many open research issues and particular challenges. Although FANETs come with many advantages, they still bear many unique challenges. One of the most prominent challenges is to establish a robust communication infrastructure between highly mobile UAVs. Moreover, the awareness of the exact geographical locations of the neighboring UAVs is vital for a safe flight. In addition, the dissemination of the location information among the FANET nodes is of higher importance in the sense of packet transmission, reliability, and collision avoidance (CA).In this chapter, we investigate the opportunities and challenges of utilization of directional antennas for FANETs, and we propose a FANET model with directional antennas and present some design guidelines along with the cast of our FANET design experience. We also present solutions to some of the controversial issues in FANETs.