A Review and Future Directions of UAV Swarm Communication Architectures

The utility of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has significantly disrupted aviation-related industries. As technology and policy continue to develop, this disruption is likely to continue and become even larger in magnitude. A specific technology poised to disrupt industry is UAV swarm. UAV swarm has the potential to distribute tasks and coordinate operation of many drones with little to no operator intervention. This paper surveys literature regarding UAV swarm and proposes a swarm architecture that will allow for higher levels of swarm autonomy and reliability by utilizing cellular mobile network infrastructure. Additionally, this paper chronicles initial testbed development to meet this proposed architecture. Specific development of higher levels of autonomous swarms with UAV-to-UAV communication and coordination ability is central to advancing the utility of UAV swarms. The use of cellular mobile framework alleviates many limiting factors for UAVs including range of communication, networking challenges, size-weight-and-power (SWaP) considerations, while leveraging a robust and reliable infrastructure for machine to machine (M2M) communication proposed by 5G systems.