MULTIHOP ROUTING OF TELEMETRY DATA IN DRONE SWARMS

Abstract

In 2015, a group of Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) professors and students set the record for largest fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm flown at one time. The swarm had 50 vehicles flying simultaneously and successfully demonstrated distributed decision-making with all processing occurring on swarm vehicles rather than a centralized control station. Much of the decision-making is based on telemetry data that is continuously streamed from all the nodes. At that time all telemetry data was broadcast in a single-hop radio environment using 802.11 in AdHoc mode. In the future, drone swarm distribution and mobility patterns will necessitate multi-hop communications for this telemetry data. This paper models the network currently used by the NPS drone swarm as well as potential future topologies and evaluates candidate multihop routing protocols for this application.