Intelligent management of constrained links for distributed autonomy
Troy R. Johnson, Nathan Jensen · 2021
This paper addresses one of the main underlying obstacles overlooked when adding autonomy to a cooperative cluster of nodes working together to complete global objectives. The limited bandwidth of the constrained link must be shared between all nodes and becomes a pinch point for distributed autonomy. Intelligently managing the shared information and controlling how it is replicated across all nodes is vital. Lack of communication results in poor team performance. Intermittent connectivity and delayed intelligence sharing leads to the cooperative cluster performing no better or even worse than a single node as the team acts and reacts to misinformation. This paper addresses how we solved the problems encountered with constrained links and distributing information by utilizing application layer routing to perform QoS on a per route basis and creating a unique method of passing generic objects of information.