DTN ROUTING PROTOCOLS FOR DRONE SWARM TELEMETRY

Abstract

Drone swarms pose a particular challenge to telemetry networks, due to the number of airborne nodes involved, and their potential to overwhelm the available bandwidth on the communications channel with simultaneous telemetry streams. Previously, we saw that mobile ad-hoc (MANET) routing protocols could exacerbate this issue by flooding the network with routing-control packets. In this work we model the Naval Postgraduate School fixed-wing drone swarm and compare the performance of several disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) routing protocols designed to address these challenges.