Luis Pinto successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Aerial Multi-Hop Sensor Networks” at FEUP in Porto

Luis Pinto successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Aerial Multi-Hop Sensor Networks” at FEUP in Porto.he thesis built on the growing interest in using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for online monitoring applications, particularly inexpensive multi-rotors. The proposal encompassed several small UAVs working collaboratively to provide extended sensing reach to operators on a ground station (GS). While a sub-group of the UAVs carried out the sensing function, another group set up an aerial multi-hop backbone to convey the sensing stream to the GS. Based on an experimental evaluation and modeling of the wireless link between two UAVs, the work led to three main contributions namely the Distributed Variable Slot Protocol that relies on TDMA with adaptive slot-length for coordinating transmissions, the Dynamic Relay Placement to mitigate links asymmetries by adjusting the position of the nodes in the backbone and a group navigation technique that increases the sensing rate in large areas. Altogether, these techniques bring significant benefits in terms of throughput, delay and reliability.