Distributed connectivity maintenance for Flying Ad-hoc Networks considering bridging links

With the increasingly widespread applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), various critical issues remain to be settled. Among these, connectivity maintenance is one of the most fundamental problems. In this paper, we focus on designing a distributed connectivity preserving framework in a Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) in the presence of bridging links, whose existence has a significant impact on the connectivity of the network. Firstly, a distributed neighbor selection rule is developed to generate the topology of the FANET. After that, a distributed control input is designed to achieve the consensus and algebraic connectivity maximization. Specifically, a modified power iterative based algorithm is designed to approximate the Fiedler eigenpair to achieve a distributed implementation of the algorithm. Simulation results have shown that compared with the rule without or with constant connectivity maintenance rules, the network connectivity is increased to a higher value, and the total time consumed at the connectivity maintenance stage is decreased. Meanwhile, the ratio of nodes with a low degree is decreased, and the connected ratio of the network is improved.