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Successful deployment of Unmanned Vehicle Systems (UVS) in military operations has increased their popularity and utility. The ability to sustain reliable mobile ad hoc formations dramatically enhances the usefulness and performance of UVS. Formation movement increases the amount of ground coverage in less time, decreases fuel consumption of the individual nodes, and provides an avenue for mission expansion through cooperative maneuvers such as refueling. In this paper, we study the wireless communication demands that arise from formation and maintenance of UVS within the context of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). A MANET in formation is typically characterized by tradeoffs between network congestion and the ability to maintain useable communication bandwidth. Maintenance of UVS formations requires each node in the network to be peer-aware, which places a heavy demand on inner node communication. In order to mitigate the inner node network congestion, we introduce a time-slotted communication protocol. The protocol assigns time-slots and allows the designated nodes to communicate directly with other peer-nodes. This approach has been introduced within the context of the Time-Slotted Aloha protocol for station-to-station communication. The approach taken here is to embed the time-slotted reservation protocol into a standard on-demand routing protocol to also address the need to reactively and proactively respond to formation maintenance. The time-slotted on-demand routing protocol is shown to eliminate collisions due to route determination and, therefore, enhance quality of service as well as ensure necessary support for formation movement. A worst-case scenario is described and simulations performed to comparatively demonstrate the advantages of the new protocol.
Forsmann et al. (Fri,) studied this question.