Simulation of inter-UAV communication required for collaborative task execution

Inter-UAV communication is useful in many areas of human life. At CQUniversity Sydney Campus, we are currently undertaking research to find the ways as to how such communication could take place. When UAVs are employed in farms, for example, they should be able to communicate and negotiate with each other. Furthermore, due to the limited transmission range of these UAVs, they should be able to pass the messages on to the next UAV and so forth until the message is delivered to the router connected to the Internet. Existing commercial UAVs are not capable of undertaking such inter-UAV communications. For this purpose, we use computer simulations to investigate how the messages can be passed efficiently through the UAVs. We have the challenge here that UAVs have limited storage capabilities and battery power. OPNET, a network simulation tool that is widely accepted by the networking community is used for our simulations. We show that our communication method resolves the problem of inter-UAV communication. Such a network with an efficient communication method would help farmers immensely as they would be able to undertake various tasks in their farms covering many hectares autonomously and remotely through their smartphones. This communication method can be extended to other applications of UAVs such as in locating bushfires, crowd surveillance and border patrol where collaboration is required. This paper shows how such inter-UAV communication is possible via a computer simulation.