Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely exploited in environment monitoring, search-and-rescue, etc. However, the mobility and short flight duration of UAVs bring challenges for UAV networking. In this paper, we study the UAV networks with n UAVs acting as aerial sensors. UAVs generally have short flight duration and need to frequently get energy replenishment from the control station. Hence the returning UAVs bring the data of the UAVs along the returning paths to the control station with a store-carry-and-forward (SCF) mode. A critical range for the distance between the UAV and the control station is discovered. Within the critical range, the per-node capacity of the SCF mode is O(n/log n) times higher than that of the multi-hop mode. However, the per-node capacity of the SCF mode outside the critical range decreases with the distance between the UAV and the control station. To eliminate the critical range, a mobility control scheme is proposed such that the capacity scaling laws of the SCF mode are the same for all UAVs, which improves the capacity performance of UAV networks. Moreover, the delay of the SCF mode is derived. The impact of the size of the entire region, the velocity of UAVs, the number of UAVs and the flight duration of UAVs on the delay of SCF mode is analyzed. This paper reveals that the mobility and short flight duration of UAVs have beneficial effects on the performance of UAV networks, which may motivate the study of SCF schemes for UAV networks.

翻译：无人驾驶飞行器（UAV）广泛应用于环境监测、搜救等领域。然而，无人机的移动性与短续航时间为无人机组网带来了挑战。本文研究了由n架无人机作为空中传感器构成的无人机网络。无人机通常续航时间短，需频繁返回控制站补充能量。因此，返航无人机采用存储-携带-转发（SCF）模式，将沿返回路径采集的数据传回控制站。研究中发现了无人机与控制站距离的关键阈值。在该阈值范围内，SCF模式的单节点容量比多跳模式高O(n/log n)倍。然而，超出该阈值范围时，SCF模式的单节点容量随无人机与控制站距离的增加而下降。为消除该关键阈值的影响，本文提出了一种移动控制方案，使得所有无人机的SCF模式容量标度律保持一致，从而提升了无人机网络的容量性能。此外，本文推导了SCF模式的延迟特性，并分析了整个区域面积、无人机速度、无人机数量及无人机续航时间对该延迟的影响。研究揭示，无人机的移动性与短续航时间对无人机网络性能具有积极作用，这有望推动无人机网络SCF方案的研究。