Optimizing Communication and Computation for Multi-UAV Information Gathering Applications

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2018-10-09

Authors

Mason Thammawichai (Author) Other; Sujit P. Baliyarasimhuni (Author) Other; Eric C. Kerrigan (Author) Other; João B. Sousa (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Vol. 54 No. 2

Pages: 601-615

ISSN: 0018-9251

Publisher: IEEE

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 48 Citations

Scopus - 51 Citations

INSPEC

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00N-WJG

DOI: 10.1109/taes.2017.2761139

Abstract (EN): Typical mobile agent networks, such as multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems, are constrained by limited resources: energy, computing power, memory and communication bandwidth. In particular, limited energy affects system performance directly, such as system lifetime. Moreover, it has been demonstrated experimentally in the wireless sensor network literature that the total energy consumption is often dominated by the communication cost, i.e., the computational and the sensing energy are small compared to the communication energy consumption. For this reason, the lifetime of the network can be extended significantly by minimizing the communication distance as well as the amount of communication data, at the expense of increasing computational cost. In this paper, we aim at attaining an optimal tradeoff between the communication and the computational energy. Specifically, we propose a mixed-integer optimization formulation for a multihop hierarchical clustering-based self-organizing UAV network incorporating data aggregation, to obtain an energy-efficient information routing scheme. The proposed framework is tested on two applications, namely target tracking and area mapping. Based on simulation results, our method can significantly save energy compared to a baseline strategy, where there is no data aggregation and clustering scheme.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 15