MAVCP – Multipath Aerial Vehicle Control Protocol
Adax Inc
Overview
The loss of drones in hostile environments is an urgent problem. One source of losses is excessive transmissions by drones, especially those operating on a mesh network. These radio signals are readily detected by adversaries and used to track and destroy or jam the drone. Adax has a better approach to drone communications and demonstrably improved drone survival. With MAVCP, a drone survives jamming of multiple mesh nodes or destructive node losses while maintaining real-time communication performance. The amount of radio traffic is minimized for enhanced stealth, yet MAVCP still achieves best in class, fastest recovery of lost or dropped packets.
MAVCP has faster and more robust adaptation to node failures and flying mesh counter-measures than other solutions which in “peak-engagement” environments helps survival in swarms-of-drones. MAVCP can be easily integrated into existing vendor’s software for drone control. The problems of mesh networks broadcasting too much and the resulting drone losses are well known. Our solution transparently works through the mesh and can work with any mesh implementation. With MAVCP you can complete your mission while facing attacks and counter-measures.
Advantages of MAVCP:
1. MAVCP is a transport protocol derived from Adax SCTP/T with new features and capabilities aimed at protecting drone communications and mesh network operations in hostile environments, such as situations where active counter-measures are jamming or destroying drones and nodes in mesh networks. Flying and static mesh networks put great strain on conventional network applications. They require an improved and superior transport method to overcome these new challenges and demands. Without an improved transport layer mesh networks will fail to provide real-time data delivery and fail in their mission. Easily integrated, it fits between your existing application and the transport layer/radio.
2. Adax SCTP/T was developed for the demanding requirements of Telecommunication networks which require redundancy, high-reliability, rapid error recovery, and real-time performance. These qualities are expanded and carried over into Adax MAVCP.
3. Multiple independent paths through the mesh network provide greater redundancy and resilience from attack.
4. Automatic AI-evaluation of the link quality of all paths with automatic, real-time selection of a new primary data path before the existing one fails.
5. AI Stealth modes increase drone safety and can reduce radio footprint to near zero.
6. Best in class for lost or dropped packet response. Errors can be detected and corrected in 10 ms or less with fewer re-transmissions of lost packets.
7. Because of the careful control of re-transmitted packets there are fewer radio transmissions to give away a drone’s location. Less radio chatter – better stealth. This means better survival for drones connected to the mesh network.
8. Faster and more robust adaptation to node failure or mesh destruction.
9. Better mission continuity under node failure. Even with 50%-90% mesh node losses with MAVCP you can complete the mission.
10. A uniform and high-performance transport protocol simplifies and reduces your total system costs
11. Best for stealth, best in class for “peak-engagement” conditions where there is the highest rate of mesh node loss or jamming. MAVCP survives multiple mesh node jamming or losses while maintaining real-time performance.
MAVCP is ideal for flying or static Mesh networks as used by a swarm-of-drones. Even when losing nodes from the mesh, the end-to-end communication is uninterrupted.
Dynamic Path Management
As drones or vehicles move, they move away from the ground stations or mesh network nodes to which they are currently connected. MAVCP can add new IP paths and delete obsolete paths as the drone flies. This maintains redundant links and by removing old ones reduces radio transmissions.
Secure Authentication with Performance & Visibility
Security in the network is more important today than ever before. Wireless networks are particularly open to interception and interference by adversaries. Networks are subject to attacks with greater frequency and potential damage is a constant threat. This problem only increases as more devices are connected to the network.
With the RFC 4895 Authentication and RFC 6083 detecting tampering or message forgery, Adax MAVCP addresses these concerns without compromising performance or network monitoring visibility like IPsec or similar encryption methods do. Digital signatures on each packet thwarts spoofing or man-in-the attacks.
MAVCP and DTLS
Adax MAVCP and DTLS together provide payload encryption so user data is protected from prying eyes. The Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), RFC 9147, provides encryption of the payload in message-oriented protocols like MAVCP. It supports the latest in encryption algorithms to safeguard user’s data.
Quality and Reliability of Service
Built to meet the exacting demands of 5G, IoT and M2M, Adax MAVCP provides the signaling reliability to enable service providers to ensure the delivery of valuable and timely data for real-time applications with a low tolerance of latency, by implementing signaling protocols and services that:
• Perform vigilant in-service quality monitoring of the signaling links
• Detect degradation of link quality at very short, programmable intervals and take action to move to alternative links before the primary link goes out of service
• Provide redundancy via an enhanced version of multi-homing Adax MAVCP constantly monitors the primary and alternative links to ensure faster lost packet recovery in both single or multi-homing situations and pro-actively starts to repair and correct lost packet after one minimum Retransmission Timeout interval as short as 20 ms. This is industry-leading performance.
Why Adax MAVCP?
No other drone control solutions includes all of these features and options, enabling Adax MAVCP to deliver the highest levels of performance and service that:
• Detects and fixes real-time failures and achieves service restoration through alternate destination paths
• Provides both redundancy and fault tolerance for drone control applications avoiding single points of network failure
• Transparently switching while under attack to an alternate path, without packet loss or upper layer intervention.
• Improves destination and peer path failure detection
• Rapid and simplified application development and deployment by preservation of message boundaries, ordered and optionally unordered delivery of MAVCP user messages, and support for large numbers of unidirectional and bidirectional streams (good for video and surveillance).
• Partial reliability extension as defined in RFC3758 and dynamic address reconfiguration extension as defined in RFC5061 (good for mapping, imaging, and real-time video).
• DTLS tuned with Adax MAVCP provides fast, real-time, encryption performance. DTLS over MAVCP gives 2-to-5 times better real-time response than UDP
• Adax libraries provide a simple framework for applications to interface directly to DTLS and take full advantage of the underlying MAVCP features
Sample Applications that require the advantages of Adax MAVCP
Applications with high-throughput and low-latency requirements include:
• Vehicle control, telematics and updates
• Video surveillance
• Location tracking
Applications with a low tolerance of errors and latency include:
• Drone positioning and location.
• Augmented and Virtual Reality
• Industrial robotics and environmental control
Standards
• IETF RFC 6083 Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) for SCTP
• IETF RFC 9147 Datagram Transport Layer Security v1.3
• IETF RFC 5062 Security Attacks Against SCTP
• IETF RFC 9260 Stream Control Transport Protocol
• IETF RFC 4895 Authenticated Chunks for SCTP
• IETF RFC 3758 Partial Reliability Extension
• IETF RFC 2104 HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication
Adax Inc
2900 Lakeshore Ave,
Oakland, CA 94610, USA
Contact: sales@adax.com
Tel: (510) 548 7047
Web: https://www.adax.com