Communications network design, simulation, and analysis for an autonomous unmanned vehicle system

Abstract

In this thesis, we designed, simulated, and analyzed a wireless communications system for an autonomous unmanned vehicle system. The system used for the design context is the Unmanned Vehicle (UV) Sentry, which is a system of autonomous unmanned vehicles that can be tasked for a variety of missions that involve the patrolling and protecting of a geographical region. Accordingly, the communications network needs to allow for flexibility of the vehicle topography to enable large amounts of delay intolerant sensor data to be transmitted between nodes and a capability that allows vehicles to act as relays for other vehicles. To meet these requirements, a medium access control (MAC) relay protocol based on the IEEE 802.16 standard was developed. To evaluate the performance of the protocol, Simulink was used to model the performance of the protocol as it was implemented in a specific UV Sentry scenario. Several network parameters were chosen as factors for the model, and these factors were systematically varied to yield a full factorial design of experiments. The network quality of service parameters for the tests were then analyzed to determine the best communication network configuration for the UV Sentry scenario and to illuminate the tradeoffs between the factors.