Dynamic topology reconstruction protocol for UAV swarm networking

Abstract

Along with the fourth industrial revolution, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has grown very rapidly over the past decade. With this rapid growth, studies using UAVs are underway in various areas. UAVs are more economical and effective when utilizing several nodes rather than operating a single aircraft. In general, UAVs collect and transmit information to the control center (CC), and act on control commands from the CC. Communication between UAVs and the control center is usually achieved using modules such as radio frequency (RF), Bluetooth, Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and cellular. However, when multiple UAVs communicate directly with the CC, the limitations of communication technologies and problems with increasing nodes occur. To address these points, several studies have constructed an ad-hoc network of UAVs to address the limitations of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communication range, or the high cost of cellular systems. However, previous studies have constructed fixed topology ad-hoc networks. These studies did not take into account the problem of changing network topology due to the rapid mobility and frequent formation changes of UAVs. Due to this, limits occurred such that UAVs moved only in the pre-built topology. In this paper, we propose a dynamic topology construction protocol for UAV swarms to address this problem. The main contents of this paper are as follows. We first look at the research and limitations of existing UAV communications, and propose a protocol to solve this problem. This paper proposes a protocol for UAV construction of ad-hoc networks when trying to perform missions using multiple UAVs, and also describes how the changed network topology is reconstructed when network topology changes due to changes in flight formation. Finally, we establish a situation and apply the proposed protocol, analyze the results and describe further required research.