Intelligent route planning method with jointing topology control of UAV swarm

Abstract

Existing routing protocols without awareness of the topology causes excessive retransmissions, energy holes, and long delay, data routing performance was seriously deteriorated.Considering the relation of topology and routing, an intelligent route planning with jointing topology control (IRPJTC) method was proposed.IRPJTC consisted of two part, the virtual force-based adaptive topology control (VFATC), and the PPO-based geographic routing protocol (PPO-GRP).Based on neighbor’s mobility information, the distance between UAVs was adaptively adjusted by VFATC to provide stable links between UAVs.Combined with link stability metric in VFATC, end-to-end delay and energy consumption, a multi-objective reward function was designed by PPO-GRP to train optimal routing strategy.According to the performance study, the proposed IRPJTC reduces existing routing protocols by 12.11% of end-to-end delay, and 4.56% of energy consumption, and has a better energy balance ability.

Keywords

• UAV swarm;routing protocol;topology control;proximal policy optimization;deep reinforcement learning