Reliability in private unmanned aerial vehicle networks

Private Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks or Local Area Networks (LANs) of Drones (LoDs) are essentially a type of wireless networks. Though there are studies on reliability of wireless mesh networks, no research has been undertaken to study the reliability of LoDs. LoDs essentially contain a main branch and a redundant branch. The work described in this paper investigates whether the addition of more redundant branches would improve the reliability of LoDs considerably. For this purpose, a mathematical expression to estimate the reliability of LoDs has been developed. Simulations for the case of failure of one node in the main branch shows that there is no significant gain in reliability per node cost by increasing the number of additional branches. Furthermore, the reliability reaches hundred percent and cannot be improved further after two additional branches. As such, two redundant branches can be used in the event that this level of reliability is desired.