A General Fusion System and Maximal-Ratio Combining Fusion Rule in Unmanned Air Vehicle Network

The use of small and miniature unmanned air vehicles(UAVs) for remote sensing and detecting applications has become increasingly popular in recent years. The intermittent connectivity in a dynamically mobile UAV network (UAVN) makes it challenging to efficiently gather sensed target data. Distributed parallel detection and centralized fusion rules in classical fusion systems are based on global message connectivity. This paper investigates the communication of sensed data from a set of mobile survey UAVs to a fusion center in large indoor or outdoor severe environment. Given the dynamic connectivity of links in UAV network, a general model of Fusion System of UAV Network (FS-UAVN) is proposed to schedule the UAVs to collect detection data. Based on this FS-UAVN model, a specific fusion method named Maximal-ratio Combining Fusion Rule (MRC-FR) is provided for the fusion center. MRC-FR utilizes the theory of Maximal Ratio Combiner (MRC) to discuss the fusion performance in view of link connectivity. Evaluation shows that the proposed MRC-FR can realize the centralized fusion system with simpler formulas and express the numerical relationship between outage probability, outage capacity, connectivity probability, signal-to-noise ratio of channel, and so on.