The emerging drone swarms are capable of carrying out sophisticated tasks in support of demanding Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications by synergistically working together. However, the target area may be out of the coverage of the ground station and it may be impractical to deploy a large number of drones in the target area due to cost, electromagnetic interference and flight-safety regulations. By exploiting the innate \emph{agility} and \emph{mobility} of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), we conceive a mobile relaying-assisted drone swarm network architecture, which is capable of extending the coverage of the ground station and enhancing the effective end-to-end throughput. Explicitly, a swarm of drones forms a data-collecting drone swarm (DCDS) designed for sensing and collecting data with the aid of their mounted cameras and/or sensors, and a powerful relay-UAV (RUAV) acts as a mobile relay for conveying data between the DCDS and a ground station (GS). Given a time period, in order to maximize the data delivered whilst minimizing the delay imposed, we harness an $\epsilon$-multiple objective genetic algorithm ($\epsilon$-MOGA) assisted Pareto-optimization scheme. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mobile relaying is capable of delivering more data. As specific examples investigated in our simulations, our mobile relaying-assisted drone swarm network is capable of delivering $45.38\%$ more data than the benchmark solutions, when a stationary relay is available, and it is capable of delivering $26.86\%$ more data than the benchmark solutions when no stationary relay is available.

翻译：新兴的无人机集群能够通过协同工作，支持复杂的物联网（IoT）应用需求。然而，目标区域可能超出地面基站的覆盖范围，且由于成本、电磁干扰及飞行安全法规等因素，在目标区域部署大量无人机并不现实。利用无人驾驶飞行器（UAV）固有的灵活性与机动性，我们提出了一种移动中继辅助的无人机集群网络架构，该架构能够扩展地面基站的覆盖范围并提升有效端到端吞吐量。具体而言，一个无人机集群构成数据采集无人机集群（DCDS），借助其搭载的摄像头和/或传感器进行感知与数据收集，而一个强大的中继无人机（RUAV）作为移动中继，负责在DCDS与地面基站（GS）之间传输数据。在给定时间周期内，为最大化传输数据量同时最小化延迟，我们采用了一种基于ε-多目标遗传算法（ε-MOGA）的帕累托优化方案。仿真结果表明，所提出的移动中继方案能够传输更多数据。以仿真中具体案例为例，当存在静态中继时，我们的移动中继辅助无人机集群网络可比基准方案多传输45.38%的数据；当无静态中继可用时，可比基准方案多传输26.86%的数据。