A Resource-Aware Ant-Based Recruiting Strategy in 5G-Assisted Fanet Disaster Scenarios

Ensuring reliable audio and video communication during disaster events is a critical area of study for the scientific community. The effectiveness of first aid in such situations is critical and can be life-saving. In such a scenario, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks is able to guarantee the provisioning of connectivity in areas severely involved in emergency and disaster events and where the communication infrastructures are seriously compromised. Anyway, this type of network - known as Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANET) - has to take into account different issues related to resource constraints, especially in terms of bandwidth and energy. To address these challenges, in this paper, a recruiting strategy inspired by ant colony behavior is proposed. This strategy has been designed in order to consider multiple metrics such as distance, bandwidth, energy, and delay. Integrating such a resource-aware recruiting strategy into the FANET permits the displacement of additional UAVs when needed due to a surge in users' requests or an increasing burden imposed on the existing ones. This approach allows the network to adapt to user demands, guaranteeing effective task completion during critical missions.