Lifetime-Constrained Message Delivery Problem In Airborne Relay Network

Airborne Network (AN) is a new class of wireless networking technology, which isborn in the information warfare. It uses all kinds of airplanes as network node, toimprove the flexibility and transmission capability of battlefield wireless network by theswift mobility of the airplane. AN is an important part in the “Space-Air-TerrestrialIntegrated Networks” in U.S.’s “Network-Centric Warfare” strategy, and it runs in themiddle of the satellite network and the terrestrial network to connect them. AN is alsoused to strengthen the transmission capability of the in-use networks. AN has broadapplication prospects in the military and civilian spheres, such as battlefield temporarynetwork relaying, battlefield situational awareness, target surveillance and tracking,temporary command of the network for disaster rescue and relief.The swift mobility of airplane promotes AN in flexibility, robustness andsurvivability. However, it brings new challenges to network topology control. Airplanesin AN can be categorized into two types, according to its roles. One is networkbackbone nodes, which stays in some points in the area to act as a backbone router in air(helicopters). The other is ferry node, which moves through a certain area to serve othernetwork nodes using message ferrying scheme. Because the moving speed of theairplane is far different from the transmission speed of the wireless channel, themessage ferry portion in the network will become the bottleneck of the transmissionperformance. In this paper, we choose the battlefield airborne relay network, and focuson the lifetime-restrained message delivery, to study the airplane’s moving pathplanning strategies.Firstly, current researches on message ferry scheme in Delay/Disruption TolerantNetworks are summarized. Then, the Lifetime-Constrained Message Delivery Problemare raised by constrain some conditions in the classical message ferry problem and givea formal definition and derive some properties. According to the properties, the pathdefined in problem is constrained into simple-cycle as the approximate problem to theoriginal one. The simple-cycle problem is solved by simulate annealing algorithm andproved its effectiveness by programming, resulting in about30%promotion of themessage delivery rate. In the real condition, some global information are hard to knownas we assume in the problem, so an online path scheme for the ferry node with limitedinformation is studied in this thesis. An algorithm framework is designed and simulateresults are get by ONE simulator. At last, the follow-up research of this field isconsidered.