Drones are becoming increasingly important in a wide range of applications. These flying agents have the potential to revolutionize various areas including disaster response, search and rescue operations, and logistics. Typically, UAV swarms rely on external infrastructure to coordinate their movements and maintain communication. However, many critical missions take place in environments where such infrastructure is limited or entirely unavailable.
M.Sc. Anna Gaydamaka’s doctoral dissertation addresses these challenges by developing methods that enable drones to operate cooperatively and efficiently even in the absence of traditional infrastructure. Her work tackles key obstacles to widespread adoption, including swarm coordination, robust situational awareness, and reliable, high-efficiency data exchange in constrained environments.
A step toward truly autonomous networks
To meet these challenges, Anna Gaydamaka’s dissertation proposes a set of novel algorithms and methods designed to support drone swarms operating in complex environments. Her dissertation introduces a distributed framework that enables UAVs to self-organize and maintain stable communication links, explores the use of radar technologies and directional antennas to enhance situational awareness, and investigates multicasting as a method to improve communication efficiency through machine learning-based optimization.
“Drones can do much more than just fly and film – they’re intelligent agents that can work together to solve complex problems,” says Anna Gaydamaka.
“My research aims to give them the communication tools they need to operate autonomously in the real world,” she continues.
The research results have been published in six scientific publications: five top-level journal articles and one peer-reviewed conference paper. The venues include IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, and IEEE Systems Journal.
Public defence on Tuesday 17 June
The doctoral dissertation of M.Sc. Anna Gaydamaka in the field of Communications Engineering titled System-Level Methods and Models for Coordination and Resource Management in UAV Networks with Directional Antennas will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University, Hervanta campus, in the auditorium TB104 of Tietotalo building (Korkeakoulunkatu 1, Tampere) on Tuesday 17 June 2025 at 12.00.
The Opponent will be Associate Professor Chrysostomos Chrysostomou from Frederick University, Cyprus. The Custos will be Dr. Dmitri Moltchanov from Tampere University, Finland. The work has been co-supervised by Professor Mikko Valkama from Tampere University, Finland.
The doctoral dissertation is available online.
The public defence can be followed via remote connection.