Protocol Design and Delay Analysis for a MUAV-Based Aerial Sensor Swarm

In dynamic networks such as highly mobile swarms of micro unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAV) the round trip time (RTT) is a crucial key figure for the reliability and viability of the system. For this purpose the deployed protocols and underlying network architecture have to be designed in awareness of the available and allocatable throughput. In this paper we are investigating a network and protocol design of a novel system approach for aerial remote sensing by means of MUAV swarms. Since effectiveness and performance ability of the navigation, control and guidance algorithms depend not only on sense and avoid or collision avoidance capabilities of each MUAV, we are particularly analyzing the delays and RTT between each node in the considered agent-based avionic mesh network. As the proposed protocol design has got a significant impact on the processing delay of embedded systems, a major focus is given to the RTT analysis of a multi-hop WLAN mesh network. Next to the self-interference caused in the experimental testbed, external co-channel and common channel interference are considered to emulate a realistic environment.