Leveraging Multicast Primitives for Highly Available Replication in Drone Swarms
Resumo
Drone swarms have emerged as promising robotic platforms to solve an increasing number of real-world problems. Yet, the design of fully distributed services atop drones remains challenging largely due to limitations in underlying network stacks. To address this, we make a case for highly available replication as a key building block for distributed computing in the face of ad hoc, lossy wireless networks. Our work leverages multicast primitives and Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to improve replica synchronisation. Our emulation study indicates that state-of-the-art multicast primitives play an important role on data replication in drone swarms, highlighting a fundamental trade-off between synchronisation efficiency and communication overhead.
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Weinstein, A., Cho, A., Loianno, G., and Kumar, V. (2018). Visual inertial odometry swarm: An autonomous swarm of vision-based quadrotors. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(3):1801–1807.
Yuan, C., Zhang, Y., and Liu, Z. (2015). A survey on technologies for automatic forest fire monitoring, detection, and fighting using unmanned aerial vehicles and remote sensing techniques. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 45:783–792.
Chung, T. H., Clement, M. R., Day, M. A., Jones, K. D., Davis, D., and Jones, M. (2016). Live-fly, large-scale field experimentation for large numbers of fixed-wing uavs. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 1255–1262. IEEE.
Drabkin, V., Friedman, R., Kliot, G., and Segal, M. (2007). Rapid: Reliable probabilistic dissemination in wireless ad-hoc networks. In 2007 26th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2007), pages 13–22. IEEE.
Enes, V., Almeida, P. S., Baquero, C., and Leitão, J. (2019). Efficient synchronization of state-based crdts. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.02750.
Ferreira, B. C., Dufour, G., and Silvestre, G. (2021). Mace: A mobile ad-hoc computing emulation framework. In 2021 International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), pages 1–6. IEEE.
Gilbert, S. and Lynch, N. (2012). Perspectives on the cap theorem. Computer, 45(2):30–36.
Gomes, P. S., Rodrigues, M. B., and Baquero, C. (2025). Conflictsync: Bandwidth efficient synchronization of divergent state. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.01144.
Guillen-Perez, A., Montoya, A.-M., Sanchez-Aarnoutse, J.-C., and Cano, M.-D. (2021). A comparative performance evaluation of routing protocols for flying ad-hoc networks in real conditions. Applied Sciences, 11(10):4363.
Hattenberger, G., Bronz, M., and Gorraz, M. (2014). Using the Paparazzi UAV System for Scientific Research. In IMAV 2014 Proceedings, pages 247–252, Delft, Netherlands.
Herrmann, C., Mager, F., and Zimmerling, M. (2018). Mixer: Efficient many-to-all broadcast in dynamic wireless mesh networks. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems.
Horyna, J., Baca, T., Walter, V., Albani, D., Hert, D., Ferrante, E., and Saska, M. (2023). Decentralized swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles for search and rescue operations without explicit communication. Autonomous Robots, 47(1):77–93.
Hossein Motlagh, N., Zaidan, M. A., Irjala, M., Rebeiro-Hargrave, A., Nurmi, P., and Tarkoma, S. (2025). Drones in the sky: Air quality monitoring at heights. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, pages 717–722.
Ivošević, B., Han, Y.-G., Cho, Y., and Kwon, O. (2015). The use of conservation drones in ecology and wildlife research. Journal of Ecology and Environment, 38(1):113–118.
Janic, M. (2005). Multicast in network and application layer. Dissertation (tu delft), Delft University of Technology.
Johnson, D., Ntlatlapa, N. S., and Aichele, C. (2008). A simple pragmatic approach to mesh routing using BATMAN. In 2nd IFIP International Symposium on Wireless Communications and Information Technology in Developing Countries.
Levis, P., Brewer, E., Culler, D., Gay, D., Madden, S., Patel, N., Polastre, J., Shenker, S., Szewczyk, R., and Woo, A. (2008). The emergence of a networking primitive in wireless sensor networks. Communications of the ACM, 51(7):99–106.
Preiss, J. A., Honig, W., Sukhatme, G. S., and Ayanian, N. (2017). Crazyswarm: A large nano-quadcopter swarm. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 3299–3304. IEEE.
Saquib, N., Krintz, C., and Wolski, R. (2021). Log-structured conflict-free replicated data types. Technical Report 2021-01, UCSB Technical Report.
Schranz, M., Di Caro, G. A., Schmickl, T., Elmenreich, W., Arvin, F., Şekercioğlu, A., and Sende, M. (2021). Swarm intelligence and cyber-physical systems: Concepts, challenges and future trends. Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, 60:100762.
Shah, D. (2009). Gossip algorithms. Foundations and Trends in Networking, 3(1):1–125.
Shapiro, M., Preguiça, N., Baquero, C., and Zawirski, M. (2011). Conflict-free replicated data types. In Symposium on Self-Stabilizing Systems, pages 386–400. Springer.
Spica, R., Giordano, P. R., Ryll, M., Bülthoff, H. H., and Franchi, A. (2013). An open-source hardware/software architecture for quadrotor uavs. IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 46(30):198–205.
Vásárhelyi, G., Virágh, C., Somorjai, G., Tarcai, N., Szörényi, T., Nepusz, T., and Vicsek, T. (2014). Outdoor flocking and formation flight with autonomous aerial robots. In 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pages 3866–3873. IEEE.
Villa, T. F., Gonzalez, F., Miljievic, B., Ristovski, Z. D., and Morawska, L. (2016). An overview of small unmanned aerial vehicles for air quality measurements: Present applications and future prospectives. Sensors, 16(7):1072.
Weinstein, A., Cho, A., Loianno, G., and Kumar, V. (2018). Visual inertial odometry swarm: An autonomous swarm of vision-based quadrotors. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(3):1801–1807.
Yuan, C., Zhang, Y., and Liu, Z. (2015). A survey on technologies for automatic forest fire monitoring, detection, and fighting using unmanned aerial vehicles and remote sensing techniques. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 45:783–792.
Publicado
25/05/2026
Como Citar
NASCIMENTO, João Victor; BRITO, André; SALVADOR, Ewerton; CHEN, Jiayi; ONOFRE, Tassany; LOCHIN, Emmanuel; SILVESTRE, Guthemberg.
Leveraging Multicast Primitives for Highly Available Replication in Drone Swarms. In: SIMPÓSIO BRASILEIRO DE REDES DE COMPUTADORES E SISTEMAS DISTRIBUÍDOS (SBRC), 44. , 2026, Praia do Forte/BA.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2026
.
p. 912-925.
ISSN 2177-9384.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbrc.2026.19747.
