Pereira, David Miguel dos Santos2026-01-152026-01-152025http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/116605Trabalho de Projeto de Mestrado, Engenharia Informática, 2025, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasMesh networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly becoming an important tool for applications like surveillance, target tracking and facility monitoring. Such applications likely imply video and LIDAR wireless streaming, as well as other telemetry data to operate and coordinate properly, which demands great bandwidth usage. In this thesis, we show that routing packets over CSMA/CA (native medium access protocol of WiFi, the most common wireless technology among UAVs) behaves poorly in this context due to packet collisions. We start by investigating the feasibility of implementing a TDMA-based system on top of stock WiFi, utilizing Linux Traffic Control to mitigate these limitations and deliver high-throughput communication. We then propose a novel mesh, ad-hoc and self-synchronized TDMA framework at the OS-kernel level that enhances and guarantees throughput while operating on commodity hardware and software - it is completely transparent to the applications. Experimental results show that not only is our TDMA approach feasible, but also that even without perfect synchronization it still consistently outperforms standard WiFi by providing higher throughput and more predictable network behaviour, making it particularly suitable for real-time communication in WiFi Ad-Hoc networks.application/pdfengWireless MeshIEEE 802.11TDMAWiFiQueuing Disciplinemaster thesis204122325