Allowing People to Communicate After a Disaster Using FANETs

Frédéric Guinand (1) , François Guérin (2) , Pawel Łubniewski (3)

1 RI2C - LITIS - Equipe Réseaux d'interactions et Intelligence Collective
2 GREAH - Groupe de Recherche en Electrotechnique et Automatique du Havre
3 UW - University of Warsaw

When a disaster occurs, during a long period of time people suffer to have no means to communicate with their relatives. The presented work aims at proposing a solution composed of a ground station located nearby the damaged area coupled with a swarm of drones. The ground station plays the role of a gateway between cellular networks, that are still up but out of reach of people, with drones that carry messages from and to people located in the disastered region. We analyze the possibility of deploying drones with fixed positions and a more flexible solution allowing drones to move but at the cost of intermittent communications, allowing only sms-like messages. We show that using the same number of drones, allowing drones to move improves dramatically the coverage of people with respect to a FANET in which drones stay at a fixed position. We also show that even for a very restricted number of drones, for reasonable communication ranges, almost all the people benefit from an important average connected time.

Mots clés: Flying Ad Hoc Networks; Disaster; Intermittent Communication Network; Coverage; Swarm of Drones; UAV

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Frédéric Guinand, François Guérin, Pawel Łubniewski. Allowing People to Communicate After a Disaster Using FANETs. Nets4Cars/Nets4Trains/Nets4Aircraft 2020: Communication Technologies for Vehicles, pp.181-193, 2020, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-66030-7_16⟩. ⟨hal-03352602⟩