A Survivable Communication Game based Approach for a network of cooperative UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based technologies are suitable for many civil and military application. In case of the occurrence of some natural disasters such as storms, the infrastructure of the communication system plays a vital role in offering rescue services. In such situations, energy and distance limitations can affect the operations of the UAVs and change the efficiency of the UAV network. To overcome intermittent connectivity and unstable links in this highly dynamic topology, a resilient UAV network is needed. In this paper, the communications infrastructure of a multi-UAV network is investigated in term of availability and survivability factors. We utilize the selected path in the multi-level multi-UAV network to avoid problems associated to interference, link failures, energy constrains, and routing. We present a distributed approach, namely: Survivable Communication Game based Approach (SCGA). SCGA works based on a cooperative communication between UAVs to guarantee a reliable data transmission using the best path. First, we build the utility of our approach based on the achievable rate, transmission delay, and energy consumption. Next, we formulate the interactions between UAVs based on a game framework approach. last, we conduct an extensive simulation using different communication scenarios to investigate the performance of the SCGA in terms of survivability, scalability, and reliability. In addition, the communication links and the connectivity between UAVs are tested using different performance metrics. Moreover, we compare SCGA against both of Nearest Neighbor (NN) and Nash Network Formation (NNF) schemes. The simulation results show that SCGA outperforms both of NN and NNF schemes in terms survivability, scalability, and reliability.