Implementing Hardware-in-the-Loop Protocol Simulation for UAV Networks

Existing works on UAV network protocols generally use software simulators for performance evaluation, which makes the analysis results often differ significantly from the test results in actual environments. In order to make the analysis of UAV network protocols more realistic, it is necessary to introduce actual UAV nodes into the simulation. By drawing on the idea of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation, this paper proposes a simulation framework with real UAV nodes in the loop. To show the potentials of the proposed simulation framework, an instance for HIL simulation of routing protocols is implemented. Preliminary results indicate that using a small number of actual flying UAV nodes as an organic component of simulation could reduce the gap between simulation results and actual situations.