Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7805-2458

Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Xi Yu

Committee Member

Guilherme Augusto Silva Pereira

Committee Member

Matthew C. Valenti

Abstract

Heterogeneous teams of both air and ground mobile vehicles can combine the advantages of mobility, sensing capability, and operation time when performing complex tasks. However, when ground vehicles operate in cluttered environments with randomized obstacles, they may experience line of sight (LoS) obstructions and loss of communication due to those obstacles. To mitigate this issue, an airborne relay can be positioned in the vicinity of the ground vehicles to aid communication by establishing two-hop communication links between the vehicles.

This thesis develops an analytical framework to calculate the probability of spanning a two-hop communication between a pair of ground vehicles deployed in a task space with obstacles at random locations and with random heights (i.e., a Poisson Forest) using an airborne relay at any location near the ground vehicles. It allows to provide the main result, the optimization of the airborne relay's location in scenarios involving multiple ground vehicles.

By considering the locations and heights of the ground vehicles and the airborne relay, the distance-dependent critical height describing the required height of an obstacle to block the LoS is established. To account for the dependence on distance, the blocking is modeled as an inhomogeneous Poisson point process, and the LoS probability is its void probability. When pairwise communication links are considered, the throughput (metric depending on the LoS probability and channel capacity) is used to determine when to deploy the airborne relay, and, when the airborne relay is deployed, its optimal 3-D location.

When multiple ground vehicles are considered, the throughput of the links and the layout of the communication network formed by the vehicles are used to compute the optimal positioning of the airborne relay, thus enhancing the overall throughput and connectivity of the network. The results are illustrated considering two obstacle height distributions: uniform and truncated Gaussian.

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