Adaptive Error Control Framework for a Multihop Cognitive Radio based UAVs for Disaster Management

Recently, UAVs have gained a huge attention for the mission critical applications, particularly, in the disaster management. However, for such applications, ensuring data integrity is very important. Although adding more redundant bits to the data may help to achieve this goal but, on the other hand it increase the packet size, that may result in more chances of collisions. Also normally, UAVs operates in licensed free ISM band, which is also too crowded, that further exacerbates the chance of collision. With increased collisions, the number of retransmissions will be increased, that ultimately lead to the quick drainage of the battery, which is not suitable for UAVs at all. To address these concerns, this work aims to devise an adaptive error control framework for a cognitive radio based UAV network that can help in minimizing the energy consumption of UAVs to increase their life span. The error control mechanism of this framework is a combination of ARQ and BCH block codes. Additionally, this framework is also capable of selecting the best possible route from source to sink node that is expected to provide least number of hops to sink as well as less cost in terms of energy consumption. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed framework.