QFANet: A New Communication Model Base on Tree Architecture for Flying Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years, there has been excessive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various fields and applications such as the military, healthcare and agriculture. The use of one single UAV may lead to some efficiency-related issues such as energy limits, absence of covering, natural difficulties, etc. the Flaying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET) are used to ensure communication for UAVs swarms instead of using a single UAV to communicate with Ground station (GS). In this paper, we propose a new communication model named QFANet based on a tree-architecture. The aim is to ensure efficient communication for each UAV by switching the gathered data from one UAV to another until it reaches the GS, to process data. We also propose a quality based attachment/reattachment procedure to allow a UAV to attach and re-attach to a tree if a quality degradation of the link to the collection tree is detected. The proposal is validated through tests and experiments. The obtained results show the effectiveness of QFANet to increase the space coverage and bandwidth between the GS and the nodes.