Network Resource Management in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: Challenges, Potentials, Future Applications, and Wayforward

Submission Deadline: 01 July 2019

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of Network Resource Management in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: Challenges, Potentials, Future Applications, and Wayforward.

With the rapid development in the fields of wireless ad hoc networks that do not rely on any pre-existing infrastructure, Flying Ad hoc networks (FANETs) have recently captured the attention of vendors and investors due to the flying nature of entities in the network. FANET is composed of unmanned nodes that fly at high altitude platforms such as balloons, unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. The network of nodes that fly at high altitude has gained commercial and industrial popularity because of its applications in surveillance, agriculture, photography, etc.  New applications that are being developed for FANET bring up new challenges such as multipath propagations, severe shadowing, traffic load balancing, mobility, congestion, high error rates, etc., that usually result in performance degradation of the network. However, the applications developed and used in FANET may also result in collision with other air traffic due to the above challenges.

The Federal Aviation Administration has  reported about the tremendous increase of more than 50% in  air traffic in unmanned vehicles in 2017. However, such an increase in the UAVs results in an increase in the network traffic of FANET that may lead to an unbalanced traffic distribution, resulting in an increase in packet loss. Furthermore, the high data traffic generated by the number of nodes in FANET is one of the leading causes of accidents with the commercial flights. In order to cope with such challenges, the network traffic of FANET must be distributed in such a way that it does not disturb commercial flights or the communication among the nodes that fly at high altitudes in a network.

This Special Section in IEEE Access therefore solicits original research work, novel protocols, methodologies and survey papers addressing the future challenges and solutions that embark on network resource management in FANETs.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Efficient deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at high altitude platforms (HAPs) for congestion avoidance and control
• Dynamic traffic load balancing for congestion avoidance through routing in Flying Ad hoc Networks
• Performance investigation of 5G systems with flying ad hoc networks (FANETs)
• An optimal data collection and dissemination technique for balanced traffic utilization in FANETs
• Distributed congestion-aware position oriented MAC/Routing protocols for FANETs
• Performance evaluation of layered protocols of TCP/IP for multimedia traffic in flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) at different altitude platforms
• Analysis of Reactive, proactive, and hybrid routing protocols for flying Ad Hoc networks
• Opportunistic routing for distributed video traffic dissemination over flying ad hoc networks
• A cross layer design for distributed information dissemination over flying ad hoc networks
• Agricultural environment monitoring system based on UAV in FANETs
• Congestion avoidance, detection, and mitigation in Flying Ad-Hoc Network for efficient utilization of network resources
• Distributed clustering approach for FANETs
• Enhanced connectivity for robust multimedia transmission in UAV networks
• Active Queue Management for resource sharing in Flying Ad hoc Networks
• Bio-inspired routing protocols for FANET routing
• Multi-hop and relay-based communications for distributed traffic load balancing
• Smart solutions to reduce congestion in FANETs
• Interaction of FANET with IoT
• Distributed Emergency Message Dissemination in FANET

We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility, downloads, and citations of articles.

Associate Editor: Omer Chughtai, COMSATS University Islamabad, Wah Campus, Pakistan

Guest Editors:

1. Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland
2. Leila Musavian, University of Essex, UK
3. Sidi-Mohammed Senouci, University of Bourgogne, France
4. Soumaya Cherkaoui, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada
5. Shiwen Mao, Auburn University, USA
6. Onur Alparslan, Osaka University, Japan

Relevant IEEE Access Special Sections:

1. Fairness in Futuristic Wireless Networks: Applications, Implementation, Issues, and Opportunities
2. Networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Wireless Communications, Applications, Control and Modelling
3. Convergence of Sensor Networks, Cloud Computing, and Big Data in Industrial Internet of Things

IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief: Michael Pecht, Professor and Director, CALCE, University of Maryland

Paper submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact:  umar.chughtai@gmail.com