TaMaRA: A Task Management and Routing Algorithm for FANETs

Flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) are a powerful tool for inspecting safety-critical scenarios, including post-disaster areas or military fields, where they ensure prompt area monitoring and fast detection of events of interest. However, wide area deployment of FANETs requires fast and reliable communications among devices and their base station to ensure prompt intervention upon detection of anomalies. Existing long-range communication technologies are inadequate to meet the data rate requirements and delay constraints of safety-critical applications. Previous solutions to enable ad-hoc communications in mobile networks also fall short of exploiting the controllable mobility of FANETs. To face this challenge, we formulate the connected deployment problem, where we require the FANET to dynamically create connected coverage formations to ensure multi-hop low-latency communications while performing the monitoring task. We show that addressing the above problem under the joint requirement of maximizing event coverage is NP-hard. We propose a joint Task Management and Routing Algorithm called TaMaRA, a polynomial-time solution based on a two-phase approximation of the problem. By means of extensive simulations and real field experiments we show that our approach outperforms existing solutions in terms of monitoring accuracy and system responsiveness.