Ensuring the Resilience of Complex Applications in Fully Dynamic Drone Swarms Using Simple, Low Radio Footprint Communication Primitives

Swarms of drones are used in theaters of operation that are often hostile. In the civil context, they can operate along with first responders, in degraded environments (after an earthquake, inside a nuclear plant, etc.). In such environments, radio communication can be unavailable because the infrastructures have been damaged. In the military context, it is even worse. The enemy can jam the radio and even destroy some of the drones. It is still necessary to ensure the success of the planed missions. A successful mission is a mission that achieves its goal, despite the fact that communication can be sporadic and that some of the drones can be destroyed. Additionally, and this is especially true in the military context, it is often required to have a small radio footprint to ensure furtiveness. In this paper, we address the issue of ensuring resilience of complex applications in highly unstable networks (in terms of drones and in terms of radio communication) by using simple communication primitives with low radio footprints.