Date of Award

1-2011

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Liang Dong

Second Advisor

Dr. Ikhlas Abdel-Qader

Third Advisor

Dr. Abdolazim Houshyer

Abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc network (MANET) is a popular type of wireless network that is formed by a collection of mobile nodes. Each node in such a network has the capability to communicate with its neighbors and non-neighbors through a wireless medium without using any existing network infrastructure. Due to the lack of infrastructure, all nodes in Ad-Hoc network are designed to act as an end system and a router for other nodes.

Traditionally, the dominant design methodology for network protocols was based on the open systems interconnection (OSI) reference model. This methodology divided the stack into seven layers in which each layer operates independently. Due to the dynamics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Ad-Hoc network, the conventional protocol stack is not sufficiently flexible to achieve certain quality of services (QoS) required by some applications. To overcome the limitations of the layering technique, cross-layering approach was implemented in this dissertation to adjust some key parameters in the first three layers of the OSI model based on the aircraft attitude variations (pitch, roll and yaw) and the variation of wireless links.

To that respect, directional antennas were used by the UAVs to extend the coverage area and reduce the number of hops between the source and destination. Meanwhile, since the traditional Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol assumed the use of Omni-directional antennas, we designed a new MAC scheme that adapts its parameters based on the channel Bit-Error-Rate (BER) which is affected by the new antenna system and aircraft attitude. As for the routing protocol, we modified the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol in such a way that the decision for selecting the route will be based on a local profile that holds the gathered information from the first three layers.

UAV Ad-Hoc network was implemented by using a discrete event simulator called Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET). We investigated the performance of the proposed techniques and compared them with the existing schemes. The simulation results showed that the proposed techniques improved the network performance and gave results better than the existing protocols in terms of throughput and End-to-End delay.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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