A real-time co-simulation framework for multi-UAV environments offering detailed wireless channel models

Due to the increasing popularity of UAVs, and UAV applications, the need for accurate simulation tools is now greater than ever. Simulations allow for a fast, cheap, and most importantly, safe way to test new applications and protocols. However, due to their complexity, most of the existing UAV simulators only allow simulating either the UAV physics or their communication with a high accuracy. Yet, real applications require a tool that can simulate both. Hence, in this paper, we present a real time framework where our multi-UAV simulator ArduSim, and the popular network simulator OMNeT++, are combined to achieve an advanced co-simulation tool. We show that this co-simulation approach allows for a high accuracy in terms of both UAV physics, and communication between the UAVs, factors that have a clear impact on the performance of different protocols and applications that rely on UAV-to-UAV communications. Validation experiments show that the proposed co-simulation framework is able to perform adequately in real time under moderate workloads, even in standard desktop PCs.