Mapping ad hoc communications network of a large number fixed-wing UAV swarm
Author
Pospischil, Alexis
Date
2017-03Advisor
Davis, Duane
Rohrer, Justin
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
In 2015, a group of Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) professors and students set a record when they flew 50 fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) simultaneously as a self-organizing swarm. These vehicles were able to execute behaviors based on message notification from a single ground station, and then decide within their swarm group how to order themselves. They were able to accomplish this by communicating over their 802.11n wifi connections. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of this network will be essential to scaling the swarm to larger sizes or even creating partitioned sub-swarms. The work covered in this thesis is to build a model of the NPS swarm's communication network in ns-3 simulation software and use popular network metrics to illustrate the performance of the network as swarm size increases. It also applied four routing protocols to the swarm and compares their performance to the broadcast protocol. The swarm's communication network was not very tolerant of overhead. This thesis concludes that any routing protocol applied to the (NPS) swarm in the future should consider protocols that reduce or strictly manage overhead generated by either routing tables or multiple message copies. Goodput and packet delivery ratio were the quantitative metrics used. While they illustrate reliability, they do not give a good picture of latency. It would be useful to add latency as a quantitative metric to future work because some swarm messages are more time-sensitive than others. It may be that more than one routing protocol or a protocol with variable settings would be best for this swarm and its various message priorities.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
A rapidly reconfigurable, application layer, virtual environment network protocol
Stone, Steven Walter (Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, 1996-06);The current Distributed Interactive Simulations (DIS) Protocol has a limited ability to support real time, simulated engagements of more than 1000 entities because of its excessive use of network resources. It also lacks ... -
Design and implementation of a group membership protocol.
Raghuram, Devalla (Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, 1992-09);A group membership protocol ensures agreement and consistent commit actions among group members to maintain a sequence of identical group views in spite of continuous changes, either voluntary or otherwise, in processors' ... -
A formal model of the MAC layer of an improved FDDI protocol.
Elmiro, Jose Luiz Timbo. (Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, 1991-09);This research examines an improved FDDI protocol which ideally raises the network throughput from 100 to a maximum of 300 Megabits per second. It develops the details of the protocol structure at the MAC layer and provides ...