Task-oriented and Disruption-tolerant Traffic Steering in UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in various applications. The efficient architecture and flexible routing in UAV networks are expected. In this paper, we propose a software-defined task-oriented UAV network (STUAVN) architecture and a lazy update (LU) policy. Taking account of limited on-board resource of UAV, we offload the function module from UAVs and deploy more power traffic service devices (TSDs) instead. Meanwhile, the traffic before and after passing TSDs node is different, since TSDs perform data processing according to various tasks. Hence, we formulate a task-oriented traffic steering problem. In addtion, the link disruption in the UAV network is unpredictable due to the limited battery capacity and changeable environment. Once the disruption occurs, network reconfiguration with calculated optimal path achieves optimal network performance, but frequent flow reconfiguration will increase the burden on control channels and lower down system stability. The proposed LU policy wisely determine when to update the flow tables in the UAV network. Our simulation results justify the effectiveness of the proposed policy.