Cooperative distributed unmanned aerial vehicular networks: Small and mini drones
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been widely used both in military and in civilian applications. However, the cooperation of small and mini drones in a network is capable of further improving both the performance and the coverage area of UAVs. Naturally, there are numerous new challenges to be solved before the wide spread introduction of multi UAV based heterogeneous Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET) including the formulation of a stable network structure. Meanwhile, an efficient gateway selection algorithm and management mechanism is required a swell. On the other hand, the stability control of the hierarchical UAV network guarantees the efficient collaboration of the drones. In this article, we commence with surveying the FANET structure and its protocol architecture. Then, a variety of distributed gateway selection algorithms and cloud based stability control mechanisms are addressed, complemented by a range of open challenges.