The Effects of a UAV on a Terrestrial MANET

Technological advances on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous control could make UAVs useful for communication purposes, extending the range and increasing the performance of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs). However, how and whether the UAV should be deployed in an otherwise terrestrial MANET depends on multiple parameters and objectives. In this paper, we analyze the effect of a UAV as a traffic relay compared to terrestrial-bound forwarding in a connected CSMA/CA MANET with omnidirectional antennas. A UAV is superior to terrestrial nodes in terms of connectivity, due to the larger Line-of-Sight coverage. This also means that a UAV can reduce the average number of hops in a MANET, thus reducing the self-interference problem and improve the network resource use. However, there are also negative effects of a UAV. The potential for spatial reuse is reduced, and problems due to hidden nodes increase. The results show that the UAV’s impact on throughput and fairness depends on the traffic patterns, the topology, and the traffic load.