Joint Routing and Scheduling for Deterministic Transmission in Drone Swarm Systems

The coordination and flexibility of drone swarm networks play a critical role in future combat scenarios. Since the operational tasks and functions become more complex, the time-sensitive services, including control commands, real-time audio and video streams, requires higher transmission performance. In this paper, we propose a joint routing and scheduling scheme to satisfy the deterministic transmission requirements in drone swarm networks. This scheme integrates segmented source routing and time-division multiplexing to construct a joint routing and scheduling mechanism, to control the service transmission delay within the required range. First, we analyze the architecture and service flow characteristics of swarm network, to establish a three-layer cross-layer model of service flow - forwarding link - time slot. Subsequently, an optimal link selection and time-slot allocation scheme is designed based on an integrated ant colony tabu search algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional CSMA and TD-GPSR schemes in performance metrics such as end-to-end delay, packet loss rate, and scheduling success rate, particularly under high-load conditions.