Smart deployment/movement of unmanned air vehicle to improve connectivity in MANET

Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) can provide important communication advantages to ground-based wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper, the location and movement of UAVs are optimized such that the network connectivity can be improved. Two types of network connectivity are quantified: global message connectivity and worst-case connectivity. The problems of UAV deployment and movement are formulated for these applications. The optimization problems are NP hard and some heuristic adaptive schemes are proposed in order to yield simple solutions. From the simulation results, by deploying only a single UAV, the global message network connectivity and worst-case network connectivity can be improved by up to 109% and 60%, respectively.