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Data acquisition is an important task to provide context awareness of a military operation scenario in order to support informed decisions. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) play a remarkable service in this context by collecting data on remote areas to support decision support systems in control centers. However, due to the nature of the locations where they are deployed, it is out of the question provision a conventional communication infrastructure to access them. Thus, alternative communications approaches have to be used, such as relay links via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying over the sensor network deployed on the ground. However, solutions based on this approach often propose intermittent connectivity to the WSN and/or exclusive use of the UAVs to support this connectivity. In this paper the problem is tackled by a self-organizing approach to control a UAV-relay network that provides persistent communication between WSN and back-end systems while the UAVs are not exclusively used for communication, but also have other missions to accomplish. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which increased the connectivity among UAVs nearly by a factor of three compared to the deployment without any relay algorithm. |
