Autonomous UAV-aided Mesh Wireless Networks

Mesh networks are known to provide enhanced and robust coverage by leveraging the multi-hop relaying and self-organization capabilities. Despite these advantages, in deployment scenarios where some nodes are severely obstructed from others, overall network connectivity may still be hampered. In this work, we investigate the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) serving as a smart relay to improve the connectivity in a wireless mesh network. It is the first contribution of its kind in the context of mesh networks where an UAV autonomously navigates itself to maximize the mesh connectivity based on the positioning algorithm that exploits the radio measurements collected in the network. We also validate the performance of the developed algorithm in a real-life experimental setup.