Generating UAV communication networks for monitoring and surveillance

An important use of unmanned aerial vehicles is surveillance of distant targets, where sensor information must quickly be transmitted back to a base station. In many cases, high uninterrupted bandwidth requires line-of-sight between sender and transmitter to minimize quality degradation. Communication range is typically limited, especially when smaller UAVs are used. Both problems can be solved by creating relay chains for surveillance of a single target, and relay trees for simultaneous surveillance of multiple targets. In this paper, we show how such chains and trees can be calculated. For relay chains we create a set of chains offering different trade-offs between the number of UAVs in the chain and the chain's cost. We also show new results on how relay trees can be quickly calculated and then incrementally improved if necessary. Encouraging empirical results for improvement of relay trees are presented.