A Simple Algorithm for Disintegrating Information Exchange Network of UAV Swarm

UAV swarm has self-organizing and adaptive characteristics, which has been widely studied. Efficient information exchange (IE for short) among the UAVs is essential for the swarm to accomplish the mission. Currently, the IE network of UAV swarm is regarded as a complex network, where each UAV is represented as a node and each link denotes information exchange between UAVs. In adversarial environments, UAV swarm may encounter disruptions and attacks. Several researchers have studied the process of recovering after destruction, while less attention has been given to the disintegration strategies of such scenario. Existing disintegration strategies for complex networks may not be appropriate for UAV swarm, which is capable of restore its capability in terms of rewiring. In addition, the computational efforts of current disintegration strategies seem not reasonable for disintegrating UAV swarm under highly intensive and adversarial situation. Based on the IE network model proposed by Bai, this paper proposes a new disintegration strategy by searching for ‘Closely-LinkedGroup’ for disintegrating IE network of UAV Swarm under adversarial environment. The proposed algorithm is able to find out the potential removal nodes and reducing the cost by increasing the number of nodes by maintaining the number of connected pieces. Results and comparisons with extant studies indicate that the proposed model leads to a more efficient disintegration strategies. The proposed model can provide a reference for studying the enemy swarm attack strategy and optimizing swarm model.