2010
Modeling TDMA-Based USAP in JTRS MDL for Multicast and Unicast Traffic
S. Perumal, V. Tabatabaee, J.S. Baras, C.J. Graff and D.G. Yee
Proceedings of the 2010 Military Communications Conference (MILCOM 2010), pp. 1464-1469, San Jose, CA, October 31 - November 3, 2010.
Abstract
Situational awareness requires maintaining a reasonable
level of communication connectivity in networks of
autonomous vehicles. It is difficult to overcome deep fading
from time-varying wireless channels in a dynamic and resource
constrained environment. Moreover, other system constraints
such as the energy consumption and total operation time make
the design of communication protocols for such systems more
challenging.
In this paper, we consider the problem of efficient communications
between a group of autonomous vehicles with energy consumption
and total operation time constraints in an adversarial
environment. We show that the policy of continuously attempting
to communicate reliably over the course of the mission may lead
to considerable system degradation. We propose an adaptive
algorithm to make communication attempts opportunistically,
based on the qualities of the wireless channels as the vehicles
move throughout the terrain. We compare the proposed algorithm
with a non-opportunistic algorithm in which the vehicles
blindly attempt to communicate regularly throughout the course
of the mission. We show that the proposed algorithm significantly
improves the system performance, both in terms of operation time
when the agents transmit only situational information and data
throughput when additional data transmission is necessary.