Devising a distributed co-simulator for a multi-UAV network

Practical evaluation of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) network requires a lot of money to build experiment environments, which includes UAVs, network devices, flight controllers, and so on. To investigate the time-sensitivity of the multi-UAV network, the influence of the UAVs’ mobility should be precisely evaluated in the long term. Although there are some simulators for UAVs’ physical flight, there is no explicit scheme for simulating both the network environment and the flight environments simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel co-simulation scheme for the multiple UAVs network, which performs the flight simulation and the network simulation simultaneously. By considering the dependency between the flight status and networking situations of UAV, our work focuses on the consistency of simulation state through synchronization among simulation components. Furthermore, we extend our simulator to perform multiple scenarios by exploiting distributed manner. We verify our system with respect to the robustness of time management and propose some use cases which can be solely simulated by this.