Green Mesh Network of UAVs: A Survey of Energy Efficient Protocols across Physical, Data Link and Network Layers

Green communication is one of the major research areas of future wireless networks including multi-UAV flying ad-hoc networks. The UAVs working in a collaborative manner are limited with onboard energy resources affecting the network performance. Achieving energy efficiency by proper resource management is even more critical in cases where UAVs are being used in public safety applications. Radio Resource Management conserves network power, improving the energy efficiency and network QoS by adapting the network parameters to the load variations from component level to the network level. Research work is being carried out on optimization strategies to improve the overall energy consumption in such networks. This paper presents a survey of network deployment, network management and radio resource management topics to achieve energy efficiency in multi-UAV ad-hoc networks. It provides an analysis of the energy efficient protocols across physical, data link and network layers presented in the literature to draw the energy efficiency enablers.