Decentralized Multi-Drone Delivery System: Efficient Resource Utilization

Drone-based delivery over a city is gaining popularity for several reasons. Such a conveyance system is usually managed by a cloud-based centralized mechanism. To avoid complete dependence on centralized management, recent works have attempted to develop a decentralized strategy. In this work, we study one such solution. Here, the Charging Stations (CS) where the Drones (DR) get charged, locally communicate with each other to decide how to guide the DRs to reach their destinations, following both the shortest path and avoiding congestion as much as possible. Frequent communication among neighboring CSs is a primary requirement for quickly determining a suitable path, which we facilitate through recent advancements in Synchronous-Transmission (ST)-based communication strategies. However, limitation in the number of available DRs in the entire system further complicates the situation. Simply waiting for a DR to automatically arrive at the respective source CS can be a naive solution to this problem, requiring no additional coordination. In this work, we propose a solution that utilizes the path planning strategy itself by augmenting a little more coordination to quickly retrieve a DR from the nearby CS and fulfill the request. Evaluation results show that the proposed strategy efficiently satisfies delivery requests and significantly reduces waiting time compared to the naive approach.