RE-ORA: Residual Energy-Aware Online Random Access for Improving the Lifetime of Slotted ALOHA-Based Swarming Drone Networks

In this paper, to maximize the lifetime of drone swarms by resolving the battery exhaustion problems caused by undesired retransmissions, we propose a residual energy-aware online random access scheme (RE-ORA) by adjusting the packet transmission opportunities based on the residual energy of a drone in S-ALOHA-based swarming drone networks. We aim to improve the battery lifetime of the drone with the smallest energy among the drone swarms. In addition, we analyze the success, collision, and idle probabilities of the swarming drone networks. In particular, we analyze the intradrone swarm collision and interdrone swarm collision probabilities. Through intensive simulations, we show that the proposed RE-ORA scheme outperforms the conventional algorithm with respect to the average lifetime of drone swarms and successful packet transmission probability according to the number of drones and the residual energy.