Throughput Optimization in Heterogeneous Swarms of Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Advanced Aerial Mobility

The ubiquitous deployment of 5G New Radio (5G NR) stimulates Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) swarm networking to evolve to achieve more imminent progress. The heterogeneous collaboration between UAS swarm enhances the complexity and the efficiency of mission complement that requires robustness, flexibility, and sustainability of throughput in UAS swarm networking. The conventional approaches mainly are based on the hierarchical architectures that are limited to satisfy the challenges of UAS swarm with high dynamics on a large scale. In this paper, we propose an optimal cell wall paradigm to enhance the throughput in heterogeneous UAS swarm networking. With the weight adjustment of each link, we map the optimization into a polyhedron scheduling problem and formula the problem into Max-min Throughput Fair Scheduling (MTFS). Further, we propose a max-min throughput algorithm to optimize the minimum throughput of cell wall paradigm. With the optimal max-min throughput, we optimize the schedule with edge-coloring to achieve global MTFS solving. The normalized MTFS shows our algorithm can achieve over 40% improvement of MTFS globally. In terms of MTFS solving, our algorithms have promising potential to improve the throughput and mitigate the incidents for multiple beams enabling of UAS in cell wall communication. With the throughput enhancement, the advanced aerial mobility of UAS swarm networking can be escalated on a large scale.

I. Introduction

The ubiquitous deployment of 5G New Radio (5G NR) accelerates the evolution of techniques in many fields [1], [2] that enlarges the scale of diverse implementations significantly. The prominent advantages (ultra low latency [3], experienced throughput [4], and networking efficiency [5]) of 5G NR provide progress to the collaborations and cooperation between the heterogeneous devices and platforms. The collaborations and cooperation’s, in real-time, play pivotal roles in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) swarm deployment on a large scale [6], [7]. With the enhancement of 5G NR, the UAS swarm can complete the missions which are more challenging on complexity and accuracy. The complexity and accuracy of mission complement pose a challenge to the capacities of heterogeneous UAS swarm networking. The shared information and collaborated intrusions need to be delivered to the specific UAS so that the specific sub-missions can be achieved in unambiguous time and positions. Consequently, the complement of sub-missions affects the achievement of the whole project. The high capacities of 5G NR can provide the UAS swarm networking powerful support to extend the deployment on a large scale.