Survivable communications and autonomous delivery service a generic swarming framework enabling communications in contested environments

Abstract

This paper presents an agile and generic decentralized swarming architecture called the Survivable Communications and Autonomous Delivery Service (SCADS). SCADS enables swarm members to modify their individual (local) behavior to best contribute to meeting global mission objectives. In this paper we examine how the architecture can provide an agile swarming approach to data ferrying to facilitate information exchange in a highly contested radio frequency (RF) environment. The SCADS architecture is described and the implementation of a data ferrying algorithm within the framework on multiple unmanned autonomous systems is presented. We demonstrate how this approach can disseminate data using a delay tolerant networking paradigm to efficiently deliver data in a sparse disconnected network topology in the presence RF jamming.