Radio Leashing of an Unmanned Aircraft
Cory Dixon, Eric W. Frew, Brian Argrow · Infotech@Aerospace · 2005
This paper introduces the Radio Leashing Problem and presents a control system to solve the problem for a single unmanned aircraft. The leashing problem as presented in this paper is to electronically tether an unmanned vehicle to one ore more radio nodes so that it may act as a communication repeater between them in a multi-hop network. The method proposed in this paper solves the leashing problem using only local measurements of network performance and assumes no knowledge of the node locations or on the RF propagation environment. This paper addresses two specific concepts that are not seen in literature: (i) the formulation of a control strategy based only upon received radio statistics, and (ii) utilizing the motion of a single aircraft to gain further information about the local RF environment. In this work, the signal-to-noise ratio for each individual link is the only input into a high-level control system. Due to the orbital motion of the aircraft, a gradient of the signal-to-noise field can be measured, and is used to control the motion of an orbit center point as well as provide a directional estimate of the transmitting node’s location from the aircraft. Nomenclature