Self-organizing Slot Access for Neighboring Cooperation in UAV Swarms

This article focuses on the slot access problem for neighboring cooperation in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms. To avoid the slot access process being hindered by unavailable topology information or information exchanges, a self-organized collision discovery mechanism is proposed. Each broadcaster can know whether its transmission is successful through the mechanism which provides the basic knowledge for finding the slot access strategy. Considering the distributed feature, the slot access problem is formulated as two game models. Both games are proved to have at least one Nash Equilibrum (NE) and the best NE is the optimum of the problem. Two distributed and synchronous algorithms are proposed to reach the NE. The first algorithm converges fast which satisfies the dynamic feature of UAV swarms and the second one converges to the optimum asymptotically. Moreover, to enhance the time efficiency of UAV swarms, the total number of required slots is investigated in some typical topologies and then conjectured to general ones. Simulation results verify that the proposed method is effective and the conjecture is true in almost all topologies.