Relay movement control for maintaining connectivity in aeronautical ad hoc networks

As a new sort of mobile ad hoc network (MANET), aeronautical ad hoc network (AANET) has fleet-moving airborne nodes (ANs) and suffers from frequent network partitioning due to the rapid-changing topology. In this work, the additional relay nodes (RNs) is employed to repair the network and maintain connectivity in AANET. As ANs move, RNs need to move as well in order to re-establish the topology as quickly as possible. The network model and problem definition are firstly given, and then an online approach for RNs' movement control is presented to make ANs achieve certain connectivity requirement during run time. By defining the minimum cost feasible moving matrix (MCFM), a fast algorithm is proposed for RNs' movement control problem. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other control approaches in the highly-dynamic environment and is of great potential to be applied in AANET.