A Link-Estimation Based Multi-CDSs Scheduling Mechanism for FANET Topology Maintenance.

A Connected Dominating Set (CDS) is a useful method for degrading major routing and forwarding operations in the network, which is widely applied in the mobile ad hoc networks. In a flying ad hoc network (FANET), however, high dynamics of nodes produce considerably large challenges on the topology maintenance due to rapidly time-varying connections between nodes, which will lead to a huge computation latency and overheads if exploiting current CDS algorithms. In this paper, therefore, we proposed a connection estimation-based topology control mechanism to achieve efficient maintenance of connectivity in the network. In particular, the proposed algorithm could provide a stable and effective virtual backbone sub-net in a fast changing topology of FANET, by flexibly scheduling multiple Minimum Connected Dominating Sets (MCDS) with a very efficient method. The simulation results show that, compared with typical single CDS method, the proposed algorithm presents better performances in obviously dynamic environments with respect to updating counts and rate of successful updates.