Evaluation of Potential Fields mobility strategies for aerial network provisioning

In this research work we evaluate a Potential Fields based strategy for providing communication services from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to a moving crowd of users on the ground. In order to reach this goal we equip UAVs with cellular / WiFi femto cells. In our approach we organize the UAVs in a meshed topology to be robust towards failures and - when compared to centralized architectures - highly adaptive to changes in the (communication) environment. We use virtual Potential Fields to influence the UAVs´ mobility behavior and keep the orthogonal requirements of ground area coverage and ground service provisioning time in optimal balance.