Self-Organizing Relay Selection in UAV Communication Networks: A Matching Game Perspective

For large UAV networks, timely communication is needed to accomplish a series of missions accurately and effectively. The relay technology will play an important role in UAV networks by helping drones communicate with long-distance drones, which solves the problem of the limited transmission power of drones. In this article, relay selection is seen as the entry point to improve the performance of self-organizing networks with multiple optimizing factors. Different from ground relay models, relay selection in UAV communication networks presents new challenges, including heterogeneous, dynamic, dense and limited information characteristics. More effective schemes with distributed, fast, robust and scalable features are required to solve the optimizing problem. After discussing challenges and requirements, we find that the matching game is suitable to model the complex relay model. The advantages of the matching game in self-organizing UAV communications are discussed. We provide extensive applications of matching markets, and then propose a novel classification of matching game which focuses on the competitive relationship between players. Specifically, basic preliminary models are presented and future research directions of matching game in UAV relay models are discussed.