Network mechanisms for swarms of drones in aquatic sensing environments

• Autor(a) principal: Patrício, João Bernardo Castanheira
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/29369

With the development of intelligent platforms for environment sensing, drones present themselves as a fundamental resource capable of responding to the widest range of applications. Monitoring aquatic sensing environments is one such application and the communication between them becomes a key aspect for both navigation and sensing tasks. Testing an aquatic environment with a high number of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) is very costly, requiring a lot of time and resources. Therefore, simulation platforms become elements of great importance . In this dissertation a simulator is developed containing a modular architecture, based on a delay tolerant network, being capable of simulating aquatic environments as similar as possible to real aquatic environments. In addition to the developed simulator, this dissertation presents methods and strategies of cluster formation, allowing the aquatic drones to select, in a distributed way, the gateways of each cluster that will be responsible for forwarding collected data towards the gateway on land. Two gateway selection methods were implemented, one focused on the energy of aquatic drones, and one considering different metrics such as link quality, centrality and energy. The proposed methods were evaluated across several cases and scenarios, with clusters built and changed in a dynamic way, and it was observed that the election of gateways with a method based on several metrics, together with appropriated control strategy, provides a better outcome of the network behaviour throughout the aquatic monitoring tasks.