Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as Store-Carry-Forward Nodes for Vehicular Networks

A fully connected vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) establishes a strong foundation for the development of smart cities, where one of the main objectives is the improvement of the welfare of commuting passengers. The availability of a multi-hop path across a VANET system, through vehicle-to-vehicle communication, depends mainly on the vehicular density and the willingness of vehicles to cooperate with one another. This paper proposes to minimize the path availability's dependence on vehicular density and cooperation, by utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Particularly, this paper explores, both mathematically as well as through an extensive simulation study, the advantages of exploiting UAVs as store-carry-forward nodes so as to enhance the availability of a connectivity path as well as to reduce the end-to-end packet delivery delay. The obtained results shed clear light on the benefits emanating from the coupling of UAVs with vehicles in the context of a highly promising, innovative, and hybrid vehicular networking architecture.