A Sensitivity Analysis of the DCP/Vardis Protocol for Coordinating Drone Swarms

The DCP/Vardis protocol stack is designed to support coordination and sensor data exchange tasks in ad-hoc type large-scale and multi-hop networks of drones (or drone swarms), by piggybacking coordination and sensor data onto frequently transmitted beacon packets that are present anyway to help with collision avoidance. The Vardis protocol introduces the concept of a variable, which is available to all nodes, and for which information about any modifying operation (create, update, delete) is disseminated globally using beacons. In this paper we study the sensitivity of Vardis application performance metrics related to reliability and delay to some of its key parameters. This sensitivity analysis allows to assess the relative impact of these parameters and to derive recommendations for setting their values.