Partial Topology-Aware Data Distribution within Large Unmanned Surface Vehicle Teams

In a distributed team of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV), distributing data to attain full coverage but not to overwhelm the network is a peculiar problem as in most cases USV’s within the overlay network formed have little knowledge about the network. This is associated to decision theoretical problems thus NEXPTIME. This paper presents a novel data distribution approach based on Distributed Hash Table (DHT). The proposed mechanism is partially proactive, USV’s relay data to its neighbors by selecting a neighbor with the closest hash to the data hash. The data distribution is decomposed into three stages: initial data distribution, data request, and data forwarding. The decomposition leads to a very simple but effective and efficient data distribution mechanism. Presentation of the details of the proposed data distribution algorithm is presented in respective sections of this paper with further discussions and simulated results which depict that the proposed data distribution algorithm is effective and efficient in terms of scalability, adaptability, coverage, latency, and redundancy when compared with some existing data distribution algorithms.