A dual-cluster-head based medium access control for large-scale UAV ad-hoc networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) ad hoc network has achieved significant growth for its flexibility, extensibility, and high deployability in recent years. The application of clustering scheme for UAV ad hoc network is imperative to enhance the performance of throughput and energy efficiency. In conventional clustering scheme, a single cluster head (CH) is always assigned in each cluster. However, this method has some weaknesses such as overload and premature death of CH when the number of UAVs increased. In order to solve this problem, we propose a dual-cluster-head based medium access control (DCHMAC) scheme for large-scale UAV networks. In DCHMAC, two CHs are elected to manage resource allocation and data forwarding cooperatively. Specifically, two CHs work on different channels. One of CH is used for intra-cluster communication and the other one is for inter-cluster communication. A Markov chain model is developed to analyse the throughput of the network. Simulation result shows that compared with FM-MAC (flying ad hoc networks multi-channel MAC, FM-MAC), DCHMAC improves the throughput by approximately 20%∼50% and prolongs the network lifetime by approximately 40%.