At its most general, a MAV mission has the following components:Navigate through the environmentDeploy sensors and repeater nodesRelay data back from MAV and deployed sensorsThe arbitrary topology of an unknown environment means though that line-of-sight communication excellent validation from the MAV to the outside world is often impossible. Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries Thus, the MAV must carry along and deploy a payload of repeater nodes along its flight path. These drop-off nodes must establish a wireless network over which the MAV can communicate to an external base station.The objective of the general MAV mission is to relay data from inside the unknown environment to the outside world. This data can come from the sensors on Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries the MAV, using the deployed network nodes merely as a communications infrastructure, or it can also be generated by sensors on the deployed nodes themselves.

Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries In the case Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries of reconnaissance-type missions, data from MAV sensors will be composed of short, high volume bursts (camera feeds, microphones, etc.). The stationary network nodes will generate low rate data over the long-term for purposes of anomaly detection or the monitoring of slowly-changing environmental phenomena (footstep detection, smoke detection, etc.).The most significant design constraints in such missions are weight and power consumption; the two go hand-in-hand. The lower the mass of the MAV with its payload, the less power is needed to fly, thus permitting longer missions. Similarly, the lower the power consumption, the smaller and lighter the Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries battery needed for a given mission.

Since the deployed network is initially dead payload weight on the MAV, minimizing overall Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries network power consumption Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries minimizes the battery Brefeldin_A requirements on the dropped-off nodes (or eliminates in entirely in favor of energy scavenging sources), thus lightening the load and increasing the scope of possible missions.Guidance of the MAV can either be handled remotely, Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries via a central base station, or autonomously through on-board processing. Remote control simplifies flight processing by offloading guidance and navigation decisions to a central operator. However, it imposes high throughput and low latency requirements on the network. On-board data must be passed rapidly to the operator to facilitate real-time control of the MAV.

Due to possible intra-network radio interference and limited centralized radio resources, there exist limits on the ability to utilize multiple MAVs during a mission.

Autonomous MAV operation, on the other hand, significantly increases on-board sensing and processing requirements, but reduces required sustained data rates. Autonomous operation figure 2 can also enable multiple MAVs in a single network, which increases complexity of the network AV-951 routing and general network resource allocation.Given such tradeoffs, there are a number of important citation parameters to consider when evaluating a MAV system.