Abstract
Over the past decades, Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have achieved outstanding performance in military, commercial and civilian applications. UAVs are increasingly appearing in the form of swarms or formations to meet higher mission requirements. Communication plays an important role in UAV swarm control and coordination. The communication architecture defines how information is exchanged between UAVs or between UAVs and the central control center. Routing protocols help provide reliable end-to-end data transmission. Therefore, it is particularly important to design UAV swarm communication architectures and routing protocols with high performance and stability. This review article details four communication architectures including the advantages and disadvantages. Applicable scenarios are also discussed. In addition, a systematic overview and feasibility research of routing protocols are presented in this paper. To spur further research, the open research issues of UAV swarm communication architectures and routing protocols are also investigated.
Highlights
When first developed, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were utilized for military applications, and their applications primarily comprised search and destroy missions [1], border monitoring [2] and close air support (CAS) [3]
We focus on UAV swarm communication architectures and routing protocols from both academic and engineering perspectives
Different types of UAV groups rely on gateway UAVs to perform G-T-G communication, which comprises the second layer
Summary
When first developed, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were utilized for military applications, and their applications primarily comprised search and destroy missions [1], border monitoring [2] and close air support (CAS) [3]. Drone technology has been utilized for disaster relief and management in the cases of some globally known disasters such as Katrina, the L0 Aquila earthquake, Typhoon Morakot, Tohoku Earthquake, and Haiti earthquake [13] Owing to their advantage of wide applicability, research and development of UAVs has been growing rapidly over the past few years. A high-performance and reliable communication plays an important role in meeting the challenges of a UAV swarm, including coordination and collaboration strategies [21,22,23], control mechanisms [24,25,26], security [27,28,29], mission planning algorithms [30,31,32], and more. We hope that the comparative analysis in our literature review can be useful for deploying effective communication architectures and reliable routing protocols for UAV swarms.
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