Military and disaster relief operations increasingly rely on unmanned vehicles (UxVs). It is important to develop a network control system (NCS) that can continuously coordinate and optimize the movement of UxVs based on mission objectives. However, prior research on NCS aims to always maintain a connected network topology, which limits the utility of the resulting systems. In this paper, we present an approach to systematically increase the topology flexibility for an NCS by leveraging the well-studied concept of disruption-tolerant networking (DTN). We design a DTN-compatible communication utility model that, while allowing some nodes to temporarily disconnect from others, provides for a fine-grain specification of the minimum communication frequency and the maximum hops permitted for message delivery between each pair of nodes. As such, the model supports what-if analyses before a mission to determine the best communication parameters to use for a given set of UxVs. Furthermore, we incorporate our communication model into an existing NCS and evaluate its performance in a simulated scenario involving the use of five UxVs searching for an enemy ship. The results show that our model not only enables the NCS to find the enemy ship faster but also facilitates new capabilities, such as dividing the UxVs into multiple teams responsible for different search areas.

翻译：军事与灾难救援行动日益依赖无人载具（UxV）。开发能够依据任务目标持续协调并优化UxV运动的网络控制系统（NCS）至关重要。然而，现有NCS研究旨在始终保持连通的网络拓扑，这限制了实际系统的效用。本文提出一种通过利用经过深入研究的容断网络（DTN）概念来系统提升NCS拓扑灵活性的方法。我们设计了一种兼容DTN的通信效用模型，该模型在允许部分节点暂时断开连接的同时，支持对每对节点间消息传递的最小通信频率与最大跳数进行细粒度规范。由此，该模型支持在任务执行前进行假设分析，以确定给定UxV集群的最佳通信参数。进一步地，我们将该通信模型整合至现有NCS中，并在包含五架UxV搜索敌舰的仿真场景中评估其性能。结果表明，我们的模型不仅使NCS能更快发现敌舰，还实现了将UxV划分为负责不同搜索区域的多任务编队等新能力。