An Orientation Aware Learning MAC for Multi-UAVs Networks

In this paper, we consider channel access in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) networks where a ground station is equipped with Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) capability. The problem at hand is to derive a transmission schedule for UAVs to communicate with a ground station frequently, and with minimal collisions. We first formulate a stochastic optimization problem before introducing a novel distributed Learning Medium Access Control (MAC), aka L-MAC, protocol. A key novelty of L-MAC is that it allows UAVs to learn the best orientation that results in the highest decoding success. Our simulation results show that L-MAC achieves a throughput that is 68% higher than the well-known Aloha protocol without SIC, and 28% higher than Aloha with SIC.

[1]  Andrea Berton,et al.  IEEE 802.15.4 Air-Ground UAV Communications in Smart Farming Scenarios , 2018, IEEE Communications Letters.

[2]  Feng Jiang,et al.  Optimization of UAV Heading for the Ground-to-Air Uplink , 2011, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[3]  Sultan Mahmud,et al.  Carrier Sensing-Based Medium Access Control Protocol for WLANs Exploiting Successive Interference Cancellation , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[4]  Christian Bettstetter,et al.  Achieving air-ground communications in 802.11 networks with three-dimensional aerial mobility , 2013, 2013 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[5]  Bernard Fino,et al.  Multiuser detection: , 1999, Ann. des Télécommunications.

[6]  Xiaodong Wang,et al.  Link scheduling in wireless networks with successive interference cancellation , 2011, Comput. Networks.

[7]  Christian Bettstetter,et al.  Channel measurements over 802.11a-based UAV-to-ground links , 2011, 2011 IEEE GLOBECOM Workshops (GC Wkshps).

[8]  François Baccelli,et al.  CSMA k-SIC — A class of distributed MAC protocols and their performance evaluation , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM).

[9]  Tarique Mohammed,et al.  Impact of Nakagami-m Fading Model on Multi-hop Mobile Ad Hoc Network , 2011 .

[10]  Roger Wattenhofer,et al.  Scheduling Wireless Links with Successive Interference Cancellation , 2012, 2012 21st International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN).