Codeword-based Data Collection Protocol for Optical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are a possible future application for both civil and military use. The large amount of data generated by UAVs requires high data rate connectivity, which makes FSO communication very suitable. Thus, UAV in combination with Free Space Optics (FSO) is a new challenge and will be needed everywhere, where big amounts of data have to be delivered in real-time. In the frame of this work, we propose a data collection protocol for optical UAVs networks based on optical codewords. To this objective, we consider two trees: the first tree is an identification tree with hierarchical optical codewords allowing to globally identify nodes in the network, the second tree is the collection tree that is used to pick up data from drones and route the data to the root drone in order to be delivered to a collection node for processing and decision support.