Optimal Timeslot Assignment in a Fully-connected Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Network

This paper considers a fully-connected communication network composed of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are within communication range of each other. Due to the severe self-interference of the wireless transceiver, we assume each UAV works in half-duplex mode where it cannot transmit and receive simultaneously. At the MAC layer we adopt the TDMA technique in which the time is discretized into fixed timeslots. Taking into account the constraint of maximum communication interval in terms of timeslots between any two UAVs, we formulate the timeslot assignment problem as a matching problem of the transmit and receive states of each UAV, with the target of maximizing the communication capacity of the entire network. Based on the concept of communication coding, a clique-based analytical method is provided to determine the lower bound of the maximum communication time interval, and the upper bound of the communication capacity of the UAV network. Furthermore, we design an optimal matching scheme for the assignment of the transmit and receive states of each UAV to achieve the capacity upper bound. Finally, numerical examples are provided to validate the designed models and schemes.