Information-Priority-Oriented Adaptive MAC Protocol for High Dynamic UAV Network

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted wide attention in both military and civilian fields because of their versatility, flexibility, and low-cost characteristics. In this letter, a UAV network architecture oriented to the virtual cloud processing center (VCPC) is considered, where the highly dynamic UAV network can transmit real-time data from sensors on the ground as well as data observed by the UAV nodes to the VCPC. Due to the high dynamic characteristics of UAVs, the topology of networks and traffic load within the coverage of the VCPC change frequently, especially when the priority of the information is different, and it is necessary to design a novel media access control (MAC) protocol to reduce the transmission delay of high priority and improve throughput of UAV networks. Therefore, an information priority oriented adaptive (IPOA-MAC) protocol is presented in this letter for high dynamic UAV networks. The relative length of control channel interval and service channel interval can be adaptively adjusted to improve network throughput in high dynamic application scenarios. Also, priority flag bits are set in data to ensure real-time transmission of high-priority information. Finally, the simulation results show the proposed IPOA-MAC can improve network performance effectively than other existing protocols.