Maintaining a permanent connectivity between nodes of an air-to-ground communication network

International audienceUnmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be a solution for deploying temporary networks by serving as Access Points to users on the ground. The aim is to provide multiple communication services (voice, data, video, etc.) over a specific area. The network must be deployed quickly for a relatively short period (emergency situations, sporting events, etc.), in the case of cellular network overload or blackout. A Flying Ad-Hoc Network will be deployed to cover all the potential users. The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of drone replacement due to the limitation of battery lifetime. A constraint for this kind of network is service continuity. For this purpose, an adaptation for the routing mechanism is proposed, to overcome the loss of connectivity observed in the simulations. In the beginning, a state of the art on use cases employing drones is given, followed by a description of our scenario. Thenceforth, the system is described as well as the deployment mechanism and the induced connectivity loss. In the end, we present a way to adapt the routing scheme so that the network remains connected when a node is replaced due to energy level reasons