Enhanced Transmission Control Strategies for Reliable Live Streaming in NDN-Based UAV Swarm Networks

Live audio & video streaming transmissions in UAV swarm networks are challenging tasks due to the fact that irregular UAV node mobility leads to high dynamicity of network topologies, which will jeopardize network quality of service (QoS), especially the packet loss probability. To facilitate the problem, this paper replaces the dominantly used Internet Protocol (IP) with the promising named data networking (NDN) protocol in UAV swarm networks. As the major contribution, this paper elaborates an NDN interest packet retransmission control strategy and an NDN interest packet forwarding control strategy respectively, to increase the transmission reliability of live audio & video streams in the UAV swarm networks. A discrete event driven simulator has been developed for performance evaluation of the UAV swarm networks. Comparative experiments have been done in multiple representative scenarios, and the results demonstrate that both of the proposed transmission control strategies can significantly decrease the transmission failure ratio, effectively increase the network utilization ratio, with affordable degradation on the data request delay metric.