Flexible FSO/RF Aerial Topology Reconstruction for High Network Throughput in Dynamic Atmosphere Condition

With the advancement of aerial remote sensing, hybrid free space optical (FSO) and radio frequency (RF) communication for networked flying platforms (NFPs) has emerged as a promising solution for meeting the high throughput requirement. Topology reconstruction can improve network performance by leveraging aerial networking flexibility. However, the dynamic characteristics of the atmosphere severely affect the effect of topology periodic topology reconstruction. Abrupt FSO link interruptions cause the low throughput in the entire network. To address this issue, this paper proposes a dynamic atmospheric-based topology reconstruction (DATR) model involving overall and partial topology reconstructions. It includes overall and partial topology reconstructions. In the overall reconstruction, the probabilities of characterizing RF and FSO links are unified to establish a new model for connectivity computation. In the partial reconstruction, the links are flexibly selected into the new topology. In addition, a simplified solution based on the particle swarm optimization is designed for the proposed DATR model. The numerical results demonstrate that compared with the existing model, DATR can improve network throughput across varying atmosphere variation sizes and different time points.