Drone Fleet Management communications

 One of the major concerns to address in autonomous fleet management is maintaining the connectivity between drone networks. If all the drones in a single swarm can access a base station or a central satellite system in a single hop manner, then it is optimal in terms of communication messages, their size and count and their relays. This might not scale, because of the requirement for a single base station. A multi-hop ad hoc network infrastructure provides an alternative that can scale and reduce costs. A large area can be covered with drones when they have a reliable and continuous connection. 

One of the methods of strengthening connectivity in the wireless network is the deployment of k-connected networks. The network must be at least 1-connected for nodes to communicate with each other. In 1-connected networks, malfunction of a single node can break the network. In a 2-connected framework, there is some redundancy. Malfunction of two nodes can create two networks that cannot communicate with each other. Following this pattern, at least k-nodes must fail for the connectivity to be terminated in a k-connected network. Any node can have arbitrary number of connections with other nodes but it only takes failure of k nodes to split the network. A break in the connectivity can be fixed by adding new nodes or moving existing nodes such that the current k-value of the network can be maintained as much as possible. 

Border Gateway Protocol sets a precedent for full mesh network connectivity. It is an inter-autonomous system routing protocol designed for TCP/IP internets. All BGP speakers within a single Autonomous system must be fully meshed, so that any external routing information must be re-distributed to all other routers within that autonomous system. Azure VNet provides another precedent for a full mesh network. 

A graph can be used to represent the drone network. It is considered connected if each node has a path to all other vertices in the graph. The minimum number of required vertices, which makes the connected graph disconnected when they are removed is the vertex connectivity of the graph. A k-connected graph has a vertex connectivity of k. 

Drone data is significant for analysis because it provides unparalleled vantage. It follows that the decision science using this data can be better improved with data mining. Some of these are captured via a comparison table of well-known data mining algorithms.