Research on Optimisation Techniques for Wireless Communication in UAV Cluster Operations

UAVs have been successfully used in a variety of fields including aerial light shows, crop protection, power line inspection and disaster relief. Cluster operations have strict requirements on both the transmission timeliness of communication systems and the reliability of communication systems, but traditional Wi-Fi and cellular communications have many shortcomings in terms of coverage area, anti-interference capability, and multi-UAV channel contention. This paper systematically summarises the four key challenges of UAV cluster communication, compares the mainstream optimisation methods from four aspects: aerial relay networking, directional antenna dynamic beamforming, onboard RIS and multi-mode adaptive communication switching, and comprehensively discusses the latency and communication reliability of different technologies through experimental data from public publications. The research shows that there is no single optimisation technology that can meet the requirements of large-scale cluster access and anti-interference in complex environments at the same time, while multiple technology combinations can better reduce the communication latency and improve the stability of the communication link. Finally, this paper summarises the practical limitations hindering the deployment of existing technologies and provides an outlook on future development directions for UAV cluster communication.