Multi-Drone Network Management for Disaster Communication Restoration: Architecture, Implementation, and Field Validation

In this paper, we present a reliability-aware multi-drone network management platform for restoring disrupted mobile communication services after disasters. The scientific contribution is not a new PHY/MAC scheme in isolation, but a management model that couples role assignment, relay placement, telemetry/video synchronization, and energy-aware reconfiguration, together with an explicit mapping from that model to deployable software modules. The implemented integrated control system combines a ground control system, a WebRTC/Kurento-based video transmission platform, and a oneM2M/Mobius-based data transmission platform for mission, relay, and tethered drones. Field validation with one tethered drone, one wireless relay drone, and two wireless mission drones indicates that relay-assisted operation improves both downlink and uplink SINR by 4.17 dB on average relative to direct transmission, which corresponds to a 2.61-fold increase in linear SINR and about a 20% improvement in normalized spectral efficiency. Across the seven evaluated mission points, the relay-assisted topology also expands point-wise service availability from 57.1% (4/7 points) to 100% (7/7 points). These results indicate that the proposed management architecture provides a practical basis for rapid communication restoration while also clarifying current limitations in scalability, operator workload assessment, and explicit fault-injection validation.