UAV-Assisted Air-ground Network Construction for Power Inspection in Remote Areas

Mingliu Liu, Jieyu Zhou, Zaixun Ling, Ziwei Mei, Jinli Sun, Yibo Cui, Fan Wu

Abstract: As critical infrastructure, smart grids require periodic power inspections to remain in good condition. Due to the complexities and variations in the geographical environment especially in remote areas, power inspections can be challenging. In this paper, we investigate efficient large-scale power inspections in remote areas with limited cellular network coverage by providing network support to inspection unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) via wireless mesh networks. Specifically, we first formulate a network construction problem with the objective of balancing deployment cost and transmission delay, which is an NP-hard problem. Then, we propose U-Auto, i.e., UAV-Assisted Air-ground Network Construction (U-Auto) scheme, to construct a wireless network for UAV-assisted power inspection, which includes a group-coverage maximization selection (GMS) algorithm and two air-ground link handover rules. GMS generates a wireless network topology based on a structure termed group and a utility function. Based on the network topology constructed by GMS, two air-ground link handover rules are employed to optimize transmission delay and connection stability of the air-ground link, called minDelay and minSwitch. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted based on a real world environment of a forest in Hubei, China, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

External IDs:dblp:conf/globecom/LiuZLMSC024