Virtual backbone construction for large-scale ad hoc UAV networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) technology has attracted great attention in recent years, and it has a wide range of applications. The communication among UAVs is a critical issue to support these applications. However, most of the existing routing algorithms are not suitable for UAV networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed virtual backbone construction algorithm for UAV networks. We also propose a distributed protocol to dynamically maintain this communication backbone. Our algorithm is purely distributed and scalable, as we only use the neighbour information of UAVs. We also utilise the over-heard messages broadcast by the neighbouring UAVs to construct the virtual backbone efficiently to interconnect all cluster heads (CHs). Our virtual backbone construction algorithm is efficient in terms of number of messages broadcast by each UAV and the completion time of the backbone construction. Simulation results also demonstrated that our proposed algorithm is efficient and effective.