Self-organized UAV-based Supervision and Connectivity: Challenges and Opportunities

The use of drones has become more widespread in recent years. Many use cases have developed involving these autonomous vehicles, ranging from simple delivery of packages to complex emergency situations following catastrophic events. The miniaturization and very low cost of these machines make it possible today to create large meshes to ensure network coverage in disaster areas, for instance. However, the problems of scaling up and self-organization are necessary to solve problems in these use cases. This position paper first presents different new requirements for the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) networks, involving the use of many drones. Then, it introduces solutions from distributed algorithms and real-time data processing to ensure quasi-optimal solutions to the raised problems.