Multi-Hop Protocols for Drone-to-Ground Communications

A drone, in a technological context, is an unmanned aircraft. Drones are more formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs). The common applications for the drone have included drone surveillance and drone journalism, as unmanned aircraft systems can often access locations that would be impossible for a human to get go. In the thesis, we consider the video surveillance application using drone flying over the area to be monitored and sending the video to the control sender. All network devices are presumed to be equipped with IEEE 802.11s air interfaces. In this thesis work, the performance of the IEEE 802.11s standard routing protocol was analyzed to optimize their performance in the different type of scenarios. The IEEE 802.11s standard proposes Hybrid Wireless Mesh Routing Protocol (HWMP) composed of a proactive tree- based routing and the reactive Radio Metric Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (RM-AODV) scheme to support mesh networks.