Cooperative Conflict Detection and Resolution and Safety Assessment for 6G Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The increasing number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the low-altitude airspace and the increasing complexity of the work environment present new challenges for ensuring airspace security, especially the effective conflict detection and resolution (CD&R) of UAVs. In the era of the sixth generation (6G) technology, there is an improvement in communication speed and capacity in comparison with the traditional communication technologies, which contributes to forming a UAV Internet of Things (IoTs) through remote intelligent control platform and improve the effect of CD&R. In this paper, we innovatively develop a cooperative CD&R method in the UAV IoT environment considering UAV relative motion relationships and UAV priorities. Using this method in 6G environment, the real-time and reactive conflict-free paths for UAVs can be generated. The developed method has the advantage of smaller calculation and needs fewer UAVs to take maneuvers than the CD&R methods based on traditional Artificial Potential Field (APF). To verify the effectiveness of CD&R methods, a safety assessment method (evaluate from both conflict feature and network structure perspectives) is also proposed. A Monte Carlo Simulation with “clone mechanism” is designed to incorporate the effect of CD&R systems. Three cases of distributed CD&R protocols are simulated and compared. The simulations with different parameter settings are also discussed. Quantitative simulation experiments show that the safety effect of CD&R proposed in this paper is improved a lot due to the improved APF and the UAV priority determination. Meanwhile, the safety assessment method is demonstrated to be feasible for evaluating the safety of CD&R systems.