EFFECTS OF SWARM DENSITY ON MULTIHOP DRONE TELEMETRY DATA

Abstract

Bandwidth being a limited resource in airborne telemetry networks, drone swarms are particularly challenging to instrument due to the number of airborne nodes involved. Even a modest amount of data being transmitted by each node may overwhelm the network. Prior work has evaluated these effects in a number of drone swarm mobility scenarios,and shown the difficulty of achieving reliable data delivery. However, those results do not distinguish between data loss due to congestion of the available spectrum, and loss due to changing network topologies or disconnection due to mobility. In this work we attempt to isolate those effects by keeping a simulated drone swarm stationary,and focussing on the telemetry data delivery due to changing the size and density of the swarm. We compare the performance using no multi-hoprouting protocol, as well as using DSDV, AODV, DSR, and OLSR.