Topology Data Synchronization Based on Improved CRDTs for Dynamic Multi-UAV Networks

Dynamic multi-UAV networks demand seamless topological data synchronization to enable coordination among UAVs in volatile environments with frequent UAV movements, joins and departures, and concurrent updates. Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) allow coordination-free replication with strong eventual consistency (SEC), yet existing CRDTs either replicate an entire state or ignore topology changes altogether, leading to unnecessary communication/computation/memory overhead. Here, we introduce Topology-based Chunked CRDT (TC-CRDT), a topology-aware CRDT-based synchronization model which partitions global topology into synchronizable chunks based on level hierarchy and parent–child relationships. TC-CRDT then propagates only affected chunks during topology changes. We also introduce conflict-resolving variant of TC-CRDT (TC-CRDT-CR) which exploits version metadata, detects concurrent updates and applies deterministic merging rules to resolve conflicts without central coordination. We evaluate our model against state-based and delta-based CRDTs under increasing network sizes, topology change frequency and conflict rate generated in drone networks through simulations. Results indicate: TC-CRDT provides lowest synchronization latency under various conditions, performance improved by 3.12–28.21% compared to the baseline, and TC-CRDT-CR achieves a 72.73–97.66% improvement in conflict resolution time compared to existing baseline models under highly dynamic multi-drone operating scenarios and guarantees replica convergence under high concurrency scenarios.