Dual-Frequency Cooperation MAC for UAV Networks: Protocol Design and Performance Analysis

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), currently it is a prominent problem to support large-scale UAV networking. Millimeter wave (mmWave) with directional communication offers the advantage of high-speed anti-jamming transmission, while the sub-6 GHz with omni-directional communication demonstrates better performance in maintaining and controlling the network. In this research, a Dual-frequency Cooperation MAC protocol (DC-MAC) is designed to integrate both advantages from sub-6 GHz and mmWave communication. In DC-MAC, a criterion of link concurrency and a beam tracking algorithm are proposed to reduce interference and enhance transmission efficiency of the network. To evaluate the performance of the protocol, we propose an analysis model and consequently derive the closed-form calculation for network throughput. Simulation experiments show that DC-MAC protocol achieves higher throughput and lower control overhead compared to the state-of-the-art protocols. Besides, several experiments are performed to validate the proposed model and analyze the influence of key parameters on throughput, providing a reference for protocol design.