Modeling the Instantaneous Saturation Throughput of UAV Swarm Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm has been widely applied in border surveillance, public safety, transportation management and so on. Affected by the complex mission environment and rapidly changing network topology, the network performance decreases drastically especially when an unsuitable contention window size is selected in traditional media access control (MAC) protocol. In this work, we first introduce a node-counts-based UAV swarm MAC (NCU_MAC) protocol to dynamically adjust the contention window size according to the number of neighbor nodes. Next, a four- dimensional Markov Chain model is developed to model the media access process and evaluate the performance of NCU_MAC. The expressions of the collision, transmission probability and saturation throughput are obtained theoretically. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and show the saturation throughput of the swarm network in the process of cooperative movement.