Although Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)-aided wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained many applications, it is not for long that research works have been produced to define effective algorithms and protocols. In this article, we address the UAV-enabled WSN (U-WSN), explore the performance and the capability of the UAV, define the UAV functionalities as a communication node, and describe the architectures and the relevant typical technologies that emerge from this new paradigm. Furthermore, this article also identifies the main factors which influence the U-WSN design and analyzes the open issues and challenges in U-WSN. These insights may serve as motivations and guidelines for future designs of UAV-enabled WSNs.

In this paper, a new Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol combining Transmit Power Control (TPC), Rate Adaptation (RA) and Cooperative Transmission (CT) is proposed, in the context of multi-rate ad hoc networks. The protocol aims to achieve energy efficiency of data transmission while increasing the overall network throughput. The key idea of the protocol is to allow each wireless node to create a table with the optimal power-rate combinations based only on the network interface card specifications. In the presence of low data-rate nodes the network throughput is greatly degraded. To mitigate this well-known “rate anomaly” problem we use CT to replace the direct low-rate links by relayed high-rate links. By exchanging control frames and looking up the power-rate table, the wireless node chooses the most suitable transmission strategy (which consists of selecting the most optimal power-rate combination) for each data-frame as well as the transmission scheme (direct or relayed). Results reveal an important improvement in the overall network throughput as well as in the energy consumption with the new protocol compared to the scheme without TPC and without cooperation. Furthermore, simulation results show that our scheme deliver more data per unit of energy consumption than the IEEE 802.11 scheme.

Long Term Evolution tends to become the next generation of civil security networks. In order to meet the safety user requirements, preference is given to an integrated satellite and terrestrial architecture. It provides a widespread connectivity built on the large satellite coverage. In this paper, we focus our works on the real behavior of TCP protocols, implemented in on-the-shelf devices, during a handover within the hybrid architecture. We aim to improve an optimized handover procedure by taking into account the real implementations that differ from simulation tools and RFCs. In order to highlight and solve the problematic behaviors of TCP protocol due to a S1 handover with an SGW and MME relocation, a test is set up with Linux virtual machines for TCP application linked to a NS3 LTE network simulator.

One of the challenges in managing mobility in a heterogeneous network domain remains a significant challenge in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). While SDN has effectively facilitated intra-domain mobility, inter-domain mobility has been a major issue, leading to service interruptions, packet loss, and unstable communication sessions. This article presents a new concept in mobility management: a hybrid SDN-LISP network that facilitates inter-domain communication by integrating SDN with the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). The main idea is to introduce a new event-based orchestration model that uses OpenFlow Packet-In messages to provide instantaneous updates to Endpoint Identifiers-to-Routing Locators (EID-to-RLOC) mappings, unlike traditional LISP, which relies on timers for updates. The proposed framework has been implemented and evaluated on a Mininet-WiFi testbed under various mobility conditions. The results obtained from the experimental evaluation reveal that packet loss is reduced by 92.32% when using the proposed framework over the conventional SDN Mobility approach. Although there is a slight increase in jitter overhead due to LISP encapsulation of 0.628 ms, the framework does not compromise Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) session continuity. In addition, the control plane synchronization time is also minimized to 277.5 ms. This reveals that the proposed framework is a stable mobility solution that does not depend on any conventional IP mobility solutions and can be used in future network environments requiring seamless inter-domain connectivity.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received much attention in the last few years especially with regard to routing protocols and transmission power adaptation. The main goal of power adaptation is to improve the performance and the lifetime of WSNs. By selecting the suitable Transmission Power Level (TPL), the battery lifetime of sensor nodes is increased and better overall network performance is achieved. In this paper, we investigate the impact problem of TPLs coupled with static routing in mostly-on many-to-one WSN applications. In such network pattern, all sensor nodes generate and continuously send data to a single sink via single-hop or multi-hop transmissions. The impact of routing coupled to TPLs is evaluated using network metrics such as: Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), energy consumption, transmission latency.

Advances in satellite miniaturization and launch cost reduction have enabled the deployment of increasingly large nanosatellite swarms in Low Earth Orbit. However, the ground infrastructure supporting these missions has not evolved at the same pace: many operators rely on a single ground station that can serve only one satellite at a time and must observe a non-negligible reconfiguration delay between consecutive contacts. This creates a critical bottleneck for missions requiring rapid offloading of large observation datasets within a few orbital passes. We introduce a simulation framework that evaluates two data offloading strategies, namely direct transmission and relay-based aggregation, as a function of the number of relay satellites k. Our analysis uncovers two competing effects governing system performance: insufficient relay count leaves ground station slots under-utilized due to incomplete Inter-Satellite Links aggregation, while excess relays incur unnecessary reconfiguration overhead, whose balance determines an optimal relay count k^* that maximizes the completion ratio. We further show that k^* decreases with crosslink capacity, and that the sensitivity to reconfiguration time rises sharply beyond k = W orbital passes. These results provide actionable guidance for mission designers choosing between investing in higher-rate crosslink hardware or faster ground station antenna systems.