Robust Decentralized Cooperative Resource Allocation for High-Dense Robotic Swarms by Reducing Control Signaling Impact

Abstract

High throughput, low latency, and high reliability in proximity communications for swarm robotics can be achieved using decentralized cooperative resource allocation schemes. These cooperative schemes minimize the occurrence of half-duplex problems, reduce interference, and allow a significant increase in the achievable swarm density, but requires additional signaling overhead, which makes them potentially more prone to performance degradation under realistic operation conditions. These conditions include both data, signaling, and their interdependence evaluated jointly. The negative impact of the signaling errors requires incorporating enhancement techniques to realize the full potential of the cooperative schemes. Particularly, in this paper and for this purpose, we evaluate the effects of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ), link adaptation by aggregation (LAAG) and beam selection by using directional antennas in the cooperative schemes, and compare performance with 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) NR sidelink mode 2 (including signaling) using the same techniques. Additionally, we include a comparison of the required number of control signals between sidelink mode 2 inter-UE coordination (IUC) and cooperative schemes, and introduce a decentralized rebel sub-mode behavior in our group scheduling scheme to further improve the performance at the 99.99 percentile. The simultaneous use of all these enhancement techniques in our cooperative schemes considerably reduces the impact of signaling errors and thereby increases the supported swarm size compared to sidelink mode 2.

Keywords

• Cooperative communication
• distributed resource allocation
• swarm communication
• beam selection
• antenna directivity