INTRODUCTION
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently gained the attention as dispensable autonomous vehicles for relaying sensor data for aerial surveillance during military operations. An emerging application is the use of small UAVs as relay nodes to form reliable communication links for ad-hoc ground networks in tactical situations. Field tests were conducted in [1] using a wireless node onboard a single UAV for an 802.11b ad-hoc ground network with fixed nodes. The results show that the throughput using a UAV based relay increases by a factor of two and connectivity improves by as much as 67% when compared to the ad hoc ground network without using the UAV.