Self-organized hybrid channel access method for an interleaved RTD-based swarm navigation system

Swarm navigation systems are emerging technique to investigate unknown environment. Organizing the access of shared radio channel is one of the main challenges due to the massive number of anarchical agents and the crucial mission requirements, e.g. update-rate and position accuracy. In this paper, we design a radio-based swarm navigation system and propose a pulse-coupled oscillators (PCO)-based self-organized method to access the shared channel. The channel is accessed with the time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme. The frequency division duplexing (FDD) method is built on top to solve the temporally hidden node problem. Distances are measured with the interleaved round trip delay (I-RTD) so that multiple measurements can be taken simultaneously and without the need of clock synchronization. It takes the realistic mission requirements and the physical radio effects into consideration. The simulation results show that a swarm bootstrapping task can be accomplished in a few seconds with our proposed system.