Resilient End-to-end Connectivity for Software Defined Unmanned Aerial Vehicular Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicular (UAV) networks extend wireless access for devices without infrastructure coverage, and also help establish a connectivity backbone during military reconnaissance and disaster events. This paper focuses on the design of a resilient end-to-end connectivity paradigm under unique architectural and scenario assumptions. First, the UAVs themselves are equipped with multiple interfaces that use standardized protocols, with associated variation in data throughout, range, and bit error rates. Second, there may be adversarial agents seeking to disrupt connectivity through targeted jamming in 3D spaces. Third, we assume an overlay software defined control plane, where the UAVs function as software switches, able to execute forwarding commands and determine preferred routes under controller directives. Our proposed approach devises metrics that influence the choice of the wireless interface and weights edges formed between UAV pairs. Further, it also uses a multi-layer graph model and creates maximally separated paths in 3D space to ensure resiliency to jamming. Simulation results conducted for urban scenarios reveal 34% improvement in enhanced resiliency for end-to-end outages by trading off 12% increase in latency over competing approaches.