Cooperative Routing Over Heterogeneous Wireless Interfaces for UAV Swarm Networks

Future UAV swarms are expected to carry multiple wireless interfaces that provide both additional capacity and communication redundancy. However, existing routing systems usually let each interface maintain routes independently, which causes redundant probing and inefficient use of heterogeneous resources in dynamic networks. This paper presents MHIR, a cooperative multi-interface routing framework that separates node-level reachability from interface-level forwarding and introduces a policy layer for cooperative probing, route repair, and dynamic interface selection. MHIR further adopts a time-toforward metric that accounts for route validity, bandwidth, delay, and queueing cost. Experimental results show that MHIR can effectively reallocate traffic under sudden interface degradation and achieves stronger delivery robustness than baseline schemes in both homogeneous and heterogeneous interface settings.