UD-MAC: Delay Tolerant Multiple Access Control Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, high-capacity data transmission is of utmost importance for applications such as intelligent transportation, smart cities, and forest monitoring, which rely on the mobility of UAVs to collect and transmit large amount of data, including video and image data. Due to the short flight time of UAVs, the network capacity will be reduced when they return to the ground unit (GU) for charging. Hence, we suggest that UAVs can apply a store-carry-and-forward (SCF) transmission mode to carry packets on their way back to the GU for improving network throughput. In this article, we propose a novel protocol, named UAV delay-tolerant multiple access control (UD-MAC), which can support different transmission modes in UAV networks. We set a higher priority for SCF transmission and analyze the probability of being in SCF mode to derive network throughput. The simulation results show that the network throughput of UD-MAC is improved by 57%–83% compared to vehicular multiple access control (VeMAC).