The communication in quarantined areas, e.g., due to the new COVID-19 pandemic, between isolated areas and in areas with technical damage has resulted in a great deal of interest concerning the safety of the population. A new method for ensuring communication between different areas, using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks with a well-established mobility schedule is proposed. UAVs fly based on a mission plan using regular polygons covering an area from a map. The area is considered to be equidistantly covered with points, grouped in triangles which are further grouped into hexagons. In this paper, UAVs, including battery charging or battery swapping stations and light weight Wi-Fi boards, are used for the data transfer among drones and stations using delivery protocols. UAV network analysis and evaluation (lengths of the arcs in seconds) based on experimental preliminary flight tests are proposed. Multiple simulations are performed based on six DTN algorithms, single-copy, and multiple-copies algorithms, and the efficiency of data transmission (delivery rate and latency) is analyzed. A very good delivery rate of 0.973 is obtained using the newly introduced TD-UAV Dijkstra algorithm.
Keywords: delay tolerant networks (DTN); drone; experimental flight; mobility schedule; optimization algorithms; quarantined areas; unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network.