SwarmControl: An Automated Distributed Control Framework for Self-Optimizing Drone Networks

TL;DR

SwarmControl is a novel software-defined control framework that enables automated, scalable, and flexible management of UAV networks through distributed optimization, significantly improving throughput in experimental tests.

Contribution

It introduces a unified control framework that decomposes high-level directives into distributed actions for UAV networks, with a prototype demonstrating its effectiveness.

Findings

Achieves an average throughput gain of 159% over existing solutions.

Enables swift reconfiguration of network control functionalities.

Proven effective through extensive flight experiments.

Abstract

Networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), composed of hundreds, possibly thousands of highly mobile and wirelessly connected flying drones will play a vital role in future Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks. However, how to control UAV networks in an automated and scalable fashion in distributed, interference-prone, and potentially adversarial environments is still an open research problem. This article introduces SwarmControl, a new software-defined control framework for UAV wireless networks based on distributed optimization principles. In essence, SwarmControl provides the Network Operator (NO) with a unified centralized abstraction of the networking and flight control functionalities. High-level control directives are then automatically decomposed and converted into distributed network control actions that are executed through programmable software-radio protocol stacks. SwarmControl (i) constructs a network control problem representation of the directives of the NO; (ii) decomposes it into a set of distributed sub-problems; and (iii) automatically generates numerical solution algorithms to be executed at individual UAVs. We present a prototype of an SDR-based, fully reconfigurable UAV network platform that implements the proposed control framework, based on which we assess the effectiveness and flexibility of SwarmControl with extensive flight experiments. Results indicate that the SwarmControl framework enables swift reconfiguration of the network control functionalities, and it can achieve an average throughput gain of 159% compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.