Integration of UAV and Fog-enabled Vehicle: Application in Post-Disaster Relief

In addition to military applications, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted more and more attention in civilian applications such as the post-disaster relief assistance. Indeed, advantages including better line-of-sight (LOS), wider communication range and more flexible on-demand deployment make UAVs play a unique role in rescue and disaster scenarios. Emergency tasks assigned to UAVs such as people search and rescue usually require real-time responses, since it is a life-and-death matter regarding the post-disaster relief. Considering the limited computing resources and harsh energy supply replenishment for UAVs in the post-disaster relief operations, we in this paper propose a hybrid fog computing paradigm called H-FVFC that integrates UAVs and vehicular fog computing (VFC) to run the highly demanding tasks with strict latency requirements. An architecture of H-FVFC consisting of three layers is proposed and investigated in this paper, with hope to explore the possibilities of applying this computing paradigm to post-disaster relief operations. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the task offloading in H-FVFC compared to UAV-to-Cloud scheduling strategy. The results show that task offloading in the UAV-to-Vehicle way can significantly reduce the response latency. Issues not addressed in this paper are also discussed with purpose of providing some insights to the application of integration of UAV and fog-enabled vehicle in the post-disaster relief.