Cross-layer design of control and feedback signal frames for LANs of drones

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become popular in commercial applications and the focus of interest has moved to UAV networks as well. A private UAV network or a Local Area Network of Drones (LoDs) is the best suitable UAV network for a small organization or an individual to perform specific tasks. The commercial UAVs which are available in the market has limited processing power and memory capacity. Although a UAV in a LoD can transfer the control and data signals to another UAV and finally, to the ground station, the performance of a LoD is limited by these constraints of the UAVs. In this paper, we propose a design of single control and feedback signal frame which uses a cross-layer approach. We compared the performance of this signaling mechanism with the existing signaling mechanism (a separate control and a feedback frame for each UAV) in LoD networks. We calculate the delay from the ground station to each UAV node for both signaling mechanisms and show that the new cross-layer single control and feedback frame signaling mechanism is better (less delay on the average) for signaling in a LoD network.