Communication capacity maximization in drone swarms

Abstract

Employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones as swarms of coordinating nodes offers multiple advantages for commercial as well as military applications. However, the complex communication requirements of these swarms, coupled with high data rates of advanced UAV payloads, require innovative techniques for optimizing data throughput. Channel capacity being the key resource, optimum communication architecture and network topology is critical to ensure quality of service while remaining within transmission power constraints. This paper proposes a capacity maximization approach for swarm communication architectures using mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP). These techniques are designed to tackle optimization applications involving both discrete variables and nonlinear system dynamics. Mathematical model formulated considering system constraints and desired objective function establishes applicability of MINLP. Since MINLP problems are NP-hard in general, computational overheads and search space exponentially grow with number of nodes in the swarm. Therefore, outer approximation algorithm has been applied that achieves near-optimal solutions with reduced convergence time and complexity compared with exhaustive search. Applicability of algorithm regardless of selected communication architecture has been established through realistic simulations.