Channel Aware mobility for self organizing wireless sensor swarms based on low altitude platforms

Based on the recent developments in the area of lithium polymer batteries and carbon fiber-reinforced plastic materials Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MUAV) significantly gain in importance. The use of cognitive MUAV swarms for distributing mobile sensors is a significant value add for chemical plume detection in rescue missions and also in particular for remote sensing and surveillance purposes [1][2]. The objective of our proposed cognitive and sensor aided mesh network is to maximize the spatial sensing coverage on the one hand and the connectivity between the cooperative MUAVs on the other. Next to these contrary optimization goals we developed bio-inspired algorithms seeking concurrently for a global target and a coherent topology of the swarm in order to avoid self-separations. In this paper we particularly focus on an agent-based methodology for communication aware mobility behavior of self-organizing MUAVs at high vehicular speeds which provoke fast topology changes and lead to a transient aerial mesh network. To determine the key figures of the system, the performance of dynamically adapted mobility algorithms is analyzed and compared under lognormal channel conditions.