Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity due to their many potential application fields. Alongside sophisticated sensors, UAVs can be equipped with communication adaptors aimed for inter-UAV communication. Inter-communication of UAVs to form a UAV swarm raises questions on how to manage its communication structure and mobility. In this paper, we consider therefore the problem of establishing an efficient swarm movement model and a network topology between a collection of UAVs, which are specifically deployed for the scenario of high-quality forest-mapping.
We analyze various critical transmitting sensing ranges for connectivity and coverage in three-dimensional sensor networks. As in other large-scale complex systems, many global parameters of sensor networks undergo phase transitions. For a given property of the network, there is a critical threshold, corresponding to the minimum amount of the communication effort or power expenditure by individual nodes, above (respectively, below) which the property exists with high (respectively, a low) probability. For sensor networks, properties of interest include simple and multiple degrees of connectivity coverage. First, we investigate the network topology according to the region of deployment, the number of deployed sensors, and their transmitting sensing ranges. More specifically, we consider the following problems: assume that n nodes, each capable of sensing events within a radius of r, are randomly and uniformly distributed in a 3-dimensional region R of volume V, how large must the sensing range R sub SENSE be to ensure a given degree of coverage of the region to monitor? For a given transmission range R sub TRANS , what is the minimum (respectively, maximum) degree of the network? What is then the typical hop diameter of the underlying network? Next, we show how these results affect algorithmic aspects of the network by designing specific distributed protocols for sensor networks.