Efficient Neighbor Discovery for Wide-Range FANET with Non-Uniform Directional Beams

Directional antennas are increasingly used to meet the demand for anti-interference ability and high transmission rates in Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET). However, it may experience poor efficiency in network connections for highly dynamic FANET scenarios. This work focuses on the neighbor discovery scheme in the initial establishment of wide-range FANET (wFANET) using directional antennas, which has been overlooked in previous studies. Considering the limitation of flight altitude, a non-uniform beam pattern is designed in order to minimize the beam positions while satisfying the communication requirements. Based on such beam arrangement, the optimized transmitting probability is calculated for a 2-way handshake process to maximize the likelihood of successful neighbor discovery. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has advantages in improving neighbor discovery efficiency compared to the scheme under uniform beam design.