Experimental performance analysis of two-hop aerial 802.11 networks

Small-scale multicopters operating as autonomous teams in the air are envisioned for aerial monitoring and transport of goods in a variety of applications, including disaster management and environmental monitoring. For such applications to become reality, a high-throughput wireless network is needed. This paper presents experimental performance results with commercially available quadrocopters communicating via IEEE 802.11a. In particular, we compare the infrastructure and mesh modes of 802.11 for one-hop and two-hop communications, thus analyzing network layer versus MAC layer relaying. Results illustrate that changes are required in the mesh mode to support applications demanding high throughput with low jitter.