Abstract
Drone networks offer rapid network deployment to areas that can pose access difficulty. This paper investigates the deployment of multi-hop drone-based unmanned aerial vehicles networks with a focus on the self-organization aspect. When rescue drones carry out their rescue operations which may fly faraway from the gateway, relay drones are autonomously deployed to maintain connectivity. We study the multiple dedicated connections where each rescue drone is connected to the gateway via dedicated relay drones. We show that this approach lacks sharing of relay drones and thus requires more relay drones. We then propose a centralized greedy algorithm and a distributed solution to significantly reduce the number of relay drones. We show that while the distributed self-organized drones (DSOD) solution requires a slightly higher number of relay drones than the greedy algorithm, it eliminates the need for global message exchange which makes it attractive for practical use.