The Design and Validation of ICN-Enabled Hybrid Unmanned Aerial System

This work presents a measurement study that evaluates a novel Information Centric Networking (ICN)-enabled Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) System called IH-UAS. IH-UAS leverages ICN along with an innovative system model integrating broker-based publish-subscribe message dissemination with a decentralized architecture to form an ad hoc (infrastructure-less) UAS to carry out military missions. The overarching research goal that drives this study is to design a system that pushes decision-making to the UAV swarm on the battlefield such that mission tasks are completed more reliably and in less time than traditional centralized UAV-based missions. We use theoretical and measurement-based analysis to validate the system. Through experiments conducted using a simplified variant of a Coordinated Search and Tracking (CSAT) application in IH-UAS, we demonstrate that IH-UAS performs better than the same application operating in a traditional centralized solution. We also show that the broker placement and the number of brokers are critical to application performance.