DMRP: A Decentralized Mobile Reconciliation Protocol for Eventually Consistent Replication in FANETs

Flying Ad Hoc Networks let unmanned aerial vehicles communicate directly, without relying on fixed ground infrastructure, in time-critical settings such as disaster response, search and rescue, border surveillance, precision agriculture, and military reconnaissance. UAV mobility, however, causes frequent topology changes and intermittent connectivity, so nodes typically store data locally and replicate it across the network to keep it available. The resulting challenge is consistency: independently evolving copies must be reconciled without a central coordinator, and strong consistency is not realistic in a network this prone to partitioning. We address this with the Decentralized Mobile Reconciliation Protocol (DMRP), which provides eventual consistency among UAV nodes with no external coordination, with convergence formally guaranteed whenever the swarm’s synchronisation graph is eventually connected. DMRP combines immediate local validation and convergence guarantees grounded in conflict-free replicated data type properties; hysteresis-based memory management with dual thresholds to cap journal storage overhead; adaptive delta or full-state synchronisation based on receiver lag; and epidemic propagation for transitive update dissemination. Energy efficiency guided the design throughout, through wireless broadcast and the avoidance of redundant transmissions. DMRP was implemented and evaluated through extensive OMNeT++/INET simulations of three-dimensional FANET scenarios. Results demonstrate that the protocol maintains a strictly bounded reconciliation journal, whereas the reference δ-CRDT log grows without bound, reducing reconciliation-journal storage by up to 75% at the largest workload evaluated, while achieving near-complete consistency after node isolation and network partitioning.