Large and Dense Swarms: Simulation of a Shortest Path Alarm Propagation

Abstract

This paper deals with the transmission of alarm messages in large and dense underwater swarms of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and describes the verification process of the derived algorithm results by means of two simulation tools realized by the authors. A collision-free communication protocol has been developed, tailored to a case where a single AUV needs to send a message to a specific subset of swarm members regarding a perceived danger. The protocol includes a handshaking procedure that creates a silence region before the transmission of the message obtained through specific acoustic tones out of the normal transmission frequencies or through optical signals. This region will include all members of the swarm involved in the alarm message and their neighbours, preventing collisions between them. The AUV sending messages to a target area computes a delay function on appropriate arcs and runs a Dijkstra-like algorithm obtaining a multicast tree. After an explanation of the whole building of this collision-free multicast tree, a simulation has been carried out assuming different scenarios relevant to swarm density, signal power of the modem and the geometrical configuration of the nodes.