Calling Ground Support: Cooperative DTNs for Improved Aerial Monitoring Systems

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are very well suited to support long-range communication between intermittent local clusters of Delay- and Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTN) in a disaster. However, knowledge on the disaster scenario must be gathered initially to be able to install such a system in the first place. For that, UAVs as part of an Aerial Monitoring System are deployed to assess the situation and collect information on the location of devices and the topology of the DTN itself. A comprehensive overview requires a significant effort for detailed monitoring, since each device in the DTN must be detected by the UAVs. In this paper, we introduce cooperative behavior in the DTN to collect information on the ground and sharing it with UAVs in the air. Evaluation results indicate that by calling ground support, the Aerial Monitoring System can reduce the area coverage while simultaneously increase the overall monitoring efficiency.