Cross-Layer Topology Control Mechanism for FSO-Based UAV Relay Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have played an important role in future wireless communication networks. Due to the advantage of high data rate, longer transmission range, and less interference compared to traditional radio frequency communications, free space optics (FSO) have been considered as a possible solution to enable UAV-based communication links. However, in the free space, FSO links are attenuated by atmospheric path loss, and atmospheric turbulence, which severely influences the reliability of FSO-based UAV relay networks. Thus, how to improve the network reliability of FSO networks topology is the main challenge. In this paper, we investigate the cross-layer topology control of FSO-based UAV relay networks, and formulate a trinity topology control problem, which jointly considers the problem of UAV position, the association with the access points (APs), and the topology construction of UAV networks. Also, we design an efficient trinity topology control mechanism(TTCM)to solve it, and simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.