Fault-tolerant distributed reconnaissance

This paper describes a method to efficiently canvass an area of interest using distributed sensing methods, assisted by fault-tolerant resource management. By implementing multiple aircraft in an assessment configuration, aerial monitoring and diverse sensing can be accomplished through the use of ad-hoc networking principles; aircraft act as nodes, each being a distributed agent in the network. Combined with a method called the Distributed Apt Resource Transference System (DARTS) for reallocating redundant or alternately-allocatable resources, such implementations can enjoy longer operational duration, increased coverage, and a higher probability of executing the desired reconnaissance. DARTS employs a hybridization of gossip and flooding-based resource discovery methods to find suitable replacement resources in the case of a node failure. Failures may arise due to natural (environmental) interference or malicious attacks designed to disrupt the mission. Testing of the fault-tolerant resource management techniques demonstrated resiliency of the system, resulting in minimal bandwidth requirements to reallocate (up to 6-fold reduction in traffic) and a faster speed of resource reallocation (up to 79% improvement), even in the face of an inconsistent state of operation. By implementing intrusion detection system (IDS) technologies to spawn the reallocation process (a procedure called triggering), DARTS provides a flexible, lightweight, and scalable method to efficiently allow reconnaissance and other distributed sensing applications to occur on a mobile, airborne platform.