Team Communication among Airborne Agents

In the paper, we present the architecture of Minuteman project called “Internet in the sky”. The basic goal of Minuteman project is to provide an efficient communication platform for autonomous agents systems funded by ONR. We address the main challenges of Internet in the sky architecture and introduce the key solutions. In particular, our solutions focus on team communications: intra/inter team multicast and unicast. We present a novel team multicast protocol called M-LANMAR that can provide the scalability required by battlefield and disaster recovery scenarios. At the same time, M-LANMAR is flexible enough to permit proper tuning of the trade offs between reliable and low latency multicast, while maintaining efficient congestion protection across all schemes. We further discuss unicast routing named LANMAR, which is a scalable routing protocol for large, mobile, “flat” ad hoc wireless and QoS support in unicast communications – both very important components of team communications within a mission.