Multi-UAV Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, multi-UAV systems have been revealing great potential values in applications such as surveillance, disaster rescue, mapping, cargo delivery, etc. Through coordination among multiple or even a swarm of UAVs, multi-UAV systems can improve the mission capability, survivability, and flexibility. Regarding the key technologies, Multi-UAV networks are the essential building blocks in multi-UAV systems, which provide the foundation for information transmission and further enable team behavior. Although the emergence of 5G and FANET (Flying Ad hoc Network) provides options for improving the Quality of Service (QoS) in multi-UAV networks, the off-the-shelf wireless networks are still not well suited for agile networks. Issues such as unpredictable latency and jitter, and high variance in throughput, may arise, in particular when the scale of the UAVs tends to be large. Besides, the networking and the control problems cannot be isolated while improving the overall performance of multi-UAV systems. How to develop key techniques for the control and navigation of multiple UAVs over wireless networks becomes a necessity, which raises many theoretical and practical open problems in the cross fields of control, estimation, and communications.

The Special Issue solicits key theoretical and practical contributions to networking as well as the control problems for multi-UAV systems. It aims to bring the studies from related fields (control, navigation, and networking) together.

We solicit high-quality original research papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Multi-UAV Swarms in 5G Networks
• Reliable Wireless Networks for Multi-UAV Systems
• Delay-tolerant Networking (DTN) protocols for Multi-UAV Systems
• Software Defined Networks (SDN) assisted UAV Networking
• Cooperative Control of Multi-UAV Systems
• Networked Control Under Communications Constraints
• Localization of Mobile Nodes in Wireless Networks
• Filtering/Distributed Filtering Theory and Applications
• Adaptive/Learning-based Observer and Parameter Estimation
• Task Scheduling of Multi-UAV Systems
• Interference Management of Multi-UAV Systems
• Resource Allocation of Multi-UAV Systems
• Multi-Function Device of Multi-UAV Systems

Dr. Zhihong Liu
Dr. Shihao Yan
Dr. Yirui Cong
Dr. Kehao Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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