An Optimal Scheme to Recharge Communication Drones

Abstract

The adoption and integration of drones in communication networks is becoming reality thanks to the deployment of advanced solutions for IoT and cellular communication relay schemes. However, using drones introduces new energy constraints and scheduling issues in the dynamic management of the network topology, due to the need to call back and recharge, or substitute, drones that run out of energy. In this paper, we describe the design of a drone recharging scheme for realistically limited flight time of drones, and leverage the presence of recharging stations. Indeed, drones need to be recharged periodically, and maximizing the operational time of drones is paramount to minimize the size of the fleet of drones to be devoted to a drone mission, hence its cost. We design Homogeneous Rotating Recharge (HRR), an optimal drone recharging scheduling that extends the coverage of a cellular network. HRR minimizes the number of back-up drones needed to guarantee a fixed number of operational drones, so as to support the operation of an underlying cellular network. Results show that operating a network of drones with our scheme provides reliable and stable performance over time