Decentralized Local-priority Communication Protocol for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarms

The paper proposes a decentralized communication protocol for small swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles that provides prioritized access to the control channel with limited radio resources. The approach is based on local priority selection, agent slot mapping with seat rotation for long-term fairness, and probabilistic sparsity within. This combination manages the load in a mathematical expectation, reduces the probability of collisions, and ensures low latency delivery of priority control messages without a central dispatcher. The simulation results for a swarm of 12 unmanned aerial vehicles demonstrate an increase in usable throughput, median delay at the level of one epoch, and collision rate at the level of the baseline approach with a significantly higher number of successful transmissions.