A Distributed and Robust Topology Control Scheme for UAV Swarm Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm can be widely used in the area of consumer electronics, e.g., flying display, live broadcast, unmanned logistics, etc. To support the collaboration of multiple UAVs, a connected and robust network topology is essential. This paper investigates the distributed and robust topology control scheme for UAV swarm networks. Firstly, the paper analyzes the logical relationship between critical node, robustness, and k-hop subgraph. Guided by the analysis, this paper proposes a distributed critical node detection algorithm by using the geometrical relationship of neighbors and the khop local topology. For the detected critical nodes, this paper models the k-hop local topology as a simplified block tree and adopts the minimum spanning tree algorithm to search the reinforcement edges. Through node movement, the reinforcement edges are added into the graph (network) and the critical nodes are effectively eliminated. Abundant simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithms can strike a good balance between accuracy and overhead and greatly outperform the classical topology control algorithms especially in large-scale networks. Besides, the simulation study provides some useful design guidance for robust topology control of UAV swarm networks, which can enhance the performance of the UAV related consumer electronics.