A distributed bi-connectivity maintenance mechanism for flying ad hoc network topology

In a Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET), bi-connectivity of topology makes a fundamental role for supporting a series of highly collaborative operations with real-time communications. However, it is a huge challenge to maintain persistent bi-connectivity due to highly relative motions and limited energy of flying nodes. Aiming to this issue, in this paper, we proposed a novel distributed bi-connectivity restoration mechanism by efficiently eliminating those global critical nodes in the topology. In particular, a localized topology power control algorithm (LPCBA) is designed with a simplified block cut tree model, which could effectively remove critical nodes in the k-hop induced sub-graph through adjusting node's transmission power. Additionally, a virtual potential field based mobility control algorithm (DMCBP) is proposed for complementing the restore capability of LPCBA with constrained transmission power. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can achieve better performance with respects to computing cost and communication delay compared with typical methods.