On connected deployment of delay-critical FANETs

Many safety critical scenarios, including post-disaster areas, or military fields, require prompt area monitoring and fast detection of events of interest. Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) provide a powerful tool to search the area, and locate anomalies. Nevertheless, wide-area deployment of FANETs poses a number of challenges. Existing long range communication technologies are inadequate to meet the data rate and delay requirements of a safety critical application. To face this challenge, we formulate the connected deployment problem, where we require the FANET to create connected formations to ensure multi-hop low-latency communications while performing the monitoring task. We show that addressing the above problem with the aim of maximizing event coverage is NP-hard. We propose a polynomial time solution, called Greedy Connected Deployment (GCD), based on a two phase approximation of the problem. By means of extensive simulations and real field experiments, we show that our approach outperforms existing solutions to related problems, both in terms of monitoring accuracy and system responsiveness.