Bio-Inspired Autonomic Airborne Infrastructure

We propose to develop a Bio-inspired Autonomic Airborne Infrastructure (BAAI) aimed at dynamically reconfiguring and redeploying the airborne infrastructure of predominantly/entirely unmanned airborne networking fabric in accordance with edge user demands for information push and pull. The proposed solution is based on the unique combination of hybrid medium access control protocol (HyMAC) supporting heterogeneous airborne nodes (some with omni-directional antenna only and others with directional antenna only), multi-channel routing and topology control algorithms (MCR-TC), and Digital Hormone Model (DHM) augmented with Criticality-Sensitive Control (CSC) with the goal of achieving rapid, fully autonomous adaptive deployment, redeployment, and reconfiguration of potentially thousands of airborne nodes under a broad range of tactical scenarios. This solution is founded upon extensive research and system development experiences from both National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Defense (DoD) funded projects in the areas of MANET with directional antenna and bio-inspired distributed control over the last decade.