Low Latency Reliable Data Sharing Mechanism for UAV Swarm Missions

Abstract

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms is increasing in many commercial applications as well as military applications (such as reconnaissance missions, search and rescue missions). Autonomous UAV swarm systems rely on multi-node interhost communication, which is used in coordination for complex tasks. Reliability and low latency in data transfer play an important role in the maintenance of UAV coordination for these tasks. In these applications, the control of UAVs is performed by autonomous software and any failure in data reception may have catastrophic consequences. On the other hand, there are lots of factors that affect communication link performance such as path loss, interference, etc. in communication technology (WIFI, 5G, etc.), transport layer protocol, network topology, and so on. Therefore, the necessity of reliable and low latency data sharing mechanisms among UAVs comes into prominence gradually. This paper examines available middleware solutions, transport layer protocols, and data serialization formats. Based on evaluation results, this research proposes a middleware concept for mobile wireless networks like UAV swarm systems.