Self-Healing UAV Swarms: Building Resilient 6G Networks with AERPAW

Shih-Chun Lin

Associate Professor, North Carolina State University

Shih-Chun Lin, an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University, and his team are advancing the resilience of next-generation 6G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) by enabling UAV swarms to maintain connectivity in highly dynamic, adversarial environments. In these systems, rapidly changing channel conditions and potential jamming threats can disrupt critical command-and-control links, posing significant risks to coordinated UAV operations. Traditional network recovery approaches rely on manual intervention or centralized control, which are too slow and inflexible for high-speed, autonomous swarm scenarios.

To address this challenge, Lin and his team developed RASHND (Resilient Adaptive Self-Healing Network Design), a novel framework that enables UAVs to collaboratively restore connectivity through inter-node communication. When a UAV loses its primary link, neighboring nodes dynamically reconfigure the network, effectively allowing the swarm to “heal” itself without external intervention. This decentralized approach ensures continuous operation even under degraded or contested communication conditions.

AERPAW played a key role in validating this capability beyond controlled laboratory settings. While initial experiments were conducted on a local software-defined radio testbed, AERPAW’s outdoor field environment enabled the team to evaluate their self-healing algorithms under realistic long-range propagation conditions. Using AERPAW’s programmable nodes, the researchers emulated varying network scenarios, including signal degradation and interference, and demonstrated that the UAV swarm could maintain robust connectivity despite these challenges. This work highlights a critical step toward resilient, autonomous aerial networks that can support future 6G applications in mission-critical environments.

The research is presented in “Autonomous Self-Healing UAV Swarms for Robust 6G Non-Terrestrial Networks,” to be published in the IEEE INFOCOM Workshop, Tokyo, Japan, May 2026.