UAV-Mesh: A Graph-Based Decentralized Service Mesh Framework for UAV Swarms
Chenghang Liu, Yu Han, Nuo Chen, Bingqing Shen, Hongmin Cai · 2025
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms are useful for mobile and collaborative applications due to their flexibility, scalability, and reliability. However, managing their communication and collaboration in complex environments is challenging. Service mesh has demonstrated excellent performance in managing communication between microservices in cloudnative environments. However, its centralized and static network structure design hinders its adaptability to dynamic topologies, increases vulnerability to single points of failure, and exacerbates resource constraints when applied to UAV swarms. To address these challenges, we propose UAV-Mesh, a graph-based decentralized service mesh framework for UAV swarms. It models the swarm as a dynamic graph for enabling the data plane to adapt to changing topologies, mitigates the risk of single points of failure through a decentralized control plane, and addresses resource constraints by optimizing consensus mechanism and algorithm. UAV Mesh offers a decentralized perspective for the application of service mesh in UAV swarms. Through experiments and analysis involving varying numbers of UAVs in a complex scenario, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of UAV Mesh in managing and controlling UAV services.