A Resilient UAV Swarm Networking Model Considering Communication Bandwidth

The resilience of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems describes the capability to adjust its behavior to maintain its essential functions when malfunction or attack occurs. Recent studies have modeled the UAV swarm as a network to analyze its resilience, where each UAV is represented as a node, and each link denotes information exchange between UAVs. However, the current networking method is vulnerable to malicious attacks and does not consider the individual load of one UAV is limited. In this paper, we proposed a resilient UAV swarm networking model by incorporating the effect of the limitation of the bandwidth. Under continuous malicious attacks, this proposed model could enhance the resilience of the swarm systems by rewiring the nodes. Moreover, a case study is conducted in which a UAV swarm is to perform a search and rescue task. Experimental results show that the proposed model is more resilient to malicious attacks than some existing models, e.g., the BA model, ER model, and the balanced individual communication load.