A Dual-Antenna Collaborative Communication Strategy for Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Existing communication protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) mis-fit flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) due to their exclusive design challenges on the typical long communication distance and high mobility degree of nodes. To tackle them, we introduce a hybrid omnidirectional and multi-beam directional antenna structure for gradient-elastic control-data separation. Based on dual antennas, we further propose a novel communication strategy, which combines location prediction with target tracing, to catch and trace communication targets by adaptively exchanging heartbeat locations for stable data transmission. The performance evaluation shows that our proposal achieves 35.8% increase in data link robustness.