Abstract
Verification of the correct functionality of multi-vehicle systems in high-fidelity scenarios is required before any deployment of such a complex system, e.g., in missions of remote sensing or in mobile sensor networks. Mixed-reality simulations where both virtual and physical entities can coexist and interact have been shown to be beneficial for development, testing, and verification of such systems. This paper deals with the problems of designing a certain communication subsystem for such highly desirable realistic simulations. Requirements of this communication subsystem, including proper addressing, transparent routing, visibility modeling, or message management, are specified prior to designing an appropriate solution. Then, a suitable architecture of this communication subsystem is proposed together with solutions to the challenges that arise when simultaneous virtual and physical message transmissions occur. The proposed architecture can be utilized as a high-fidelity network simulator for vehicular systems with implicit mobility models that are given by real trajectories of the vehicles. The architecture has been utilized within multiple projects dealing with the development and practical deployment of multi-UAV systems, which support the architecture’s viability and advantages. The provided experimental results show the achieved similarity of the communication characteristics of the fully deployed hardware setup to the setup utilizing the proposed mixed-reality architecture.
Highlights
In recent years, there is a growing utilization of autonomous vehicles in areas of remote sensing and mobile sensor networks, especially if these vehicles can be operated beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS)as autonomous teams
Concerning the existing work and the current lack of a proper communication architecture for the MR simulation employed in the development of unmanned aerial system (UAS), we propose a novel communication system architecture in this paper
The variances of the real traffic are higher. This is most likely caused by the medium access control (MAC) in situation when the GCS’s modem tries to send twice as much data compared to the modems in the HW scenario
Summary
There is a growing utilization of autonomous vehicles in areas of remote sensing and mobile sensor networks, especially if these vehicles can be operated beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS)as autonomous teams. Development and validation of such multi-vehicle systems are complicated tasks since there are many complex issues that need to be taken into account Some of them, such as complex interactions among individual entities (such as collision and obstacle avoidance, team cooperation, and coordinated movement), can be modeled with the help of software simulations [1,2]. The proper design of a communication subsystem (as any of the vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-base options) is one of the most important challenges of multi-vehicle system development It is crucial for the control, cooperation, and collaboration of the vehicles themselves, for the purposes of routing and topology management [3,4], message relay [5], communication constrained exploration [6], network-aware mission planning [7], or improvement in communication throughput and delay [8,9]
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