NDIEM: A Networked Drone Information Exchange Model for Heterogeneous UAV Interoperability and Communication

The rapid adoption of small drones for applications such as surveillance, disaster response, and infrastructure inspection has increased demand for coordinated multi-drone operations, in which information exchange is essential. However, effective collaboration across different drones remains challenging due to differences in information exchange and communication protocols. This paper proposes a Networked Drone Information Exchange Model (NDIEM), an XML-based model that enables interoperability of the structural information. NDIEM defines five essential element categories: Identification, Telemetry, Command and Control, Sensor, and Mission. NDIEM can be used with protocol-specific adapters for exchanging information in multi-drone operations. The proposed model has been implemented and evaluated on three different drones (an ArduPilot-based Hexacopter, a Crazyflie 2.1, and a Tello EDU) using real sensor telemetry captured under controlled conditions, in which each platform’s onboard sensors were manipulated to generate representative telemetry variation. Experimental results demonstrate information interoperability with 0.013–0.019 ms processing overhead, 0.049–0.073 ms transformation latency per message, and XSD schema validation compliance, achieving 69.7% transformation completeness for telemetry data. These findings show that NDIEM can provide a practical and scalable foundation for software development for drone collaboration and interoperability.