U-Mesh: Deploying UAV-Mesh Network for Automatic Powerline Inspection in Remote Areas

Jieyu Zhou, Feng Lyu, Mingliu Liu, Fan Wu, Lijuan He, Huali Lu, Zaixun Ling, Yibo Cui

Abstract: UAV-assisted task execution is a promising approach to powerline inspections in remote areas where no cellular network infrastructure exists for inspection data transmission. In this paper, we investigate UAV-mesh network deployment in remote areas to empower UAV-assisted powerline inspection, which is challenging considering a mountainous environment with no power supply. Particularly, given the locations of a set of power towers, we first formulate the UAV-mesh network deployment problem with connectivity and coverage constraints, which is NP-hard. Then, we propose U-Mesh, which is a cost-effective and load-balanced deployment scheme. To be specific, U-Mesh integrates three components, i.e., link identification: identifying the link conditions between power towers based on geographical barriers, NetCons: conducting local search to gradually obtain a cost-effective initial mesh nodes with connectivity and coverage constraints, and NetOpti: optimizing the initial mesh node positions to improve the mesh load and robustness from the perspectives of overall network structure. Finally, we implement U-Mesh in a 270 km2 mountain forest area, and demonstrate its efficacy in terms of both deployment cost and network performance via extensive evaluations.

External IDs:dblp:conf/icdcs/Zhou0L0HLLC25