Topology construction for flying ad hoc networks (FANETs)

A flying ad hoc network (FANET) that consists of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a promising technology for future networked systems. In this paper, we study a way to construct a topology for the FANET that guarantees end-to-end communication between the ground control station (GCS) and each mission UAV that performs its given task via optimizing the locations of the relay UAVs. To this end, we propose a topology construction algorithm based on a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a significantly higher performance gain over the random-based topology construction scheme.