Performance behavior of unmanned vehicle aided mobile backbone based wireless ad hoc networks

We introduce unmanned vehicles (UVs) to aid the operation of the mobile backbone based wireless ad hoc networks, and serve to significantly enhance the construction of a capable backbone network. We consider two types of UVs: unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The UAVs may orbit at different layers (and altitudes), communicating to ground access stations. They serve to connect distant isolated sub-networks and may act as relays for non-time-sensitive traffic flows. We position fixed UGVs in the operational area at advantageous positions to offer both high coverage of mobile units as well as to contribute to the formation of a capable high capacity backbone. Their location is selected based on observed mobility behavior (over the operational area of interest) statistics of the system´s mobile stations. They also serve to maintain the network connectivity, mobile unit coverage and add needed capacity and spatial connectivity needed to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees and to support real-time streams and critical messaging flows. In this paper, we present extensive performance results concerning the operation of a dynamic backbone based ad hoc wireless network that employs UVs. We also study three different node movement models that affect the performance of such networks.