Discrete Time Markov Chain for Drone’s Buffer Data Exchange in an Autonomous Swarm

The paper considers a network formed by a swarm of drones exchanging data in the absence of information about relative positioning, for example, when there are no connections to a satellite geolocation system and a cellular network. For the scenario where one of the drones is a receiver and the rest are transmitters, using the apparatus of the theory of random processes and the mathematical teletraffic theory, a method is proposed to estimate the main indicators of the efficiency of data exchange between drones, to analyze key performance metrics, namely, message loss probability, data transmission delay, spent energy per message transaction, and battery lifetime distribution. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.