Resilience Evaluation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Considering Packet Loss and Retransmission

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm may suffer various kinds of threat during the mission execution, the mission-oriented resilience evaluation of UAV swarm reflects the ability of UAV swarm to complete mission. Existing research on UAV swarm resilience have considered the destruction of UAV due to physical attack, but seldom consider the information retransmission caused by the unreliable wireless communication between UAVs, which obviously degrade the performance of UAV swarm. Therefore, in this study, we provide a detailed analysis of information retransmission in UAV swarm and obtained theoretical express of packet retransmission number distribution on end-to-end link. Then a mission-oriented resilience evaluation is performed to evaluate the ability of UAV swarm to complete mission. First, the retransmission probability of packet is derived by a SNR criterion, then the retransmission number distribution of packets in end-to-end transmission is obtained by using general generating function. Due to the fact that multiple packets are transmitted during information transmission, we also considered the scenario of multiple packets. Secondly, an improved performance measure of UAV swarm is proposed considering the retransmission number of packets. Finally, a comprehensive mission-oriented resilience evaluation of UAV swarm is performed. Theoretical and simulation results indicate that, the proposed model can truly depict the feature of packet retransmission in UAV swarm and leads to a more objective evaluation to the resilience of UAV swarm.