Paper accepted at LCN 2026

16 July 2026, by Mathias Fischer

Photo: https://www.ieeelcn.org

We are happy to announce that our paper, “Force-Based Optimization of UAV 3D Placement for Fault-Tolerant FANETs”, has been accepted for publication at the 51st IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (IEEE LCN'26). In this paper, we present a distributed force-based approach to build a fault-tolerant flying ad hoc network, which maximizes the communication coverage for ground user, while having the ability to rebuild connectivity after UAV failures.

We look forward to presenting our results at LCN'26 in Coimbra, Portugal, and seek an exchange with international researchers.

Paper abstract:

As our societies are dependent on modern communication infrastructures, large-scale outages can have severe consequences. One potential solution to this challenge is the rapid deployment of flying ad hoc networks (FANETs), consisting of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that act as mobile base stations, to re-establish the lost connectivity. However, due to the high operational complexity, energy constraints, and environmental exposure of the UAVs, the probability of node failures in the mesh network is notably high. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization problem that aims to optimize the 3D placement of UAVs to maximize communication coverage of a FANET while accounting for individual UAV failures. We further introduce a decentralized heuristic approach to place the UAVs accordingly and rebuild the network after failures based on the concept of electromagnetic and spring forces. In a simulated environment, we analyze communication coverage and the impact of UAV failures with different attacker strategies. We observe that with our approach, there exists a trade-off between user coverage and the fault tolerance of the FANET.