Abstract—Today, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in many different areas of military and civilian applications. Developments in the UAV technology and cheapening of the cost provide opportunity to widespread use of multiple UAVs. Communication is the most important problem in the multi-UAV systems. Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET), is the most significant development method for the solution of communication problem in multi-UAV systems. It is necessary to ensure the realization of coordinated flight of UAVs in FANET. UAVs need to know the position information of each other to also ensure coordination between themselves. Token packet usage is one of the solution to sharing of coordinated information. In this method, the exchange of information between UAVs is performed by circulating a token packet in FANET. The number of UAVs increases, the size of the token containing the location information of all UAVs will also increase. Because of this increase, token will complete its circulation in FANET in a long time. For this reason, after a certain number of UAV, one token will not be sufficient. In multi-UAV systems, UAVs can learn the details of each position with multiple token circulation. In existing studies, it was assumed that UAVs move with constant topology. In addition to this, in these studies there has been assumed that 100% of the packets transmitted. In this study, multiple token structure has been implemented for UAVs acting with a dynamic topology. Also different bit error rate (BER) values are discussed in the case of the package could not be sent. In these cases, the resend packet is provided and these cases effect on the results is observed. Thus, the use of multiple tokens structure in the multi-UAV systems is obtained with more accurate results.

Index Terms—Multi token circulation, flying Ad Hoc network (FANET), location information sharing, bit error rate (BER).

Eyup Emre Ulku is with ASTIN, Computer Engineering Department, Istanbul, Turkey.
Ilker Bekmezci is with Turkish Air Force Academy, Computer Engineering Department, Istanbul, Turkey

Cite:Eyup Emre Ulku, Ilker Bekmezci, "Multi Token Based Location Sharing for Multi UAV Systems," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 197-206, 2016.