Design Principles for Cooperative Relaying on UAVs-based FANET

Recent years have observed a good improvement in wireless communication network capabilities. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based wireless communication is an emerging area to support existing network expansions and to support a number of applications at lower costs. UAVs can be used as aerial relays forming flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) to meet the coverage holes and to support disaster recovery and target area-monitoring missions. The performance of FANETs is affected by the typical issues with UAVs and limitations posed by areas of deployment. FANETs are a subset of the vehicular ad-hoc networks, however, due to typical issues of UAVs; the FANETs are complex in nature and need efficient resource allocation. Literature reveals that cooperative relaying techniques can significantly improve the capability of such ad-hoc networks. This article reviews the typical issues of UAV-based FANETs, their design principles, and resource allocation strategies that may be adopted to improve the system performance. Both buffers-aided and buffers-less cooperative relaying on FANETs are discussed in terms of the performance parameters.