Improved Delay-Tolerant Communication by Considering Radio Propagation in Planning Data Ferry Navigation

Unmanned aircraft are becoming popular elements of team missions, where communication is essential for success. In either mobile or large environments, end-to-end communication may not be guaranteed, resulting in a need for a dedicated data ferry to deliver data. This work focuses on communication details while using an aircraft as a dedicated data ferry to collect and deliver data between separate nodes. Performance here depends heavily on the ferry's route between nodes, and we show that the route is dependant on the notion of visiting a node. In a stationary sensor network where the aircraft is given the order to visit nodes, considering range dependencies of wireless communication rates in the planning of the ferry's navigation can improve performance by reducing delay as much as 25% over more simplistic models. Ignoring these di erences may lead to choosing suboptimal routes. Communication models thus play an important role in designing higher layers of the ferry routing problem.