# Development, Implementation and Evaluation of An Epidemic Communication System
## 1 Introduction
In practical applications, related studies have utilized the sharing of environmental information between drones, as shown in Figure 1a. This shared information is then used for autonomous flight control. Additionally, the sharing of sensor data collected by robots has been employed to create maps [26, 27, 28]. In environments where the conditions for wireless communication are not ideal, epidemic communication allows nodes with information (wireless stations) to communicate autonomously and carry information by pas. Considering this background, we designed a wireless device to implement epidemic communication for drones and developed an epidemic communication system. We designed the system for practical use and considered the interference between wireless devices, the optimization of communication areas, and the amount of transmitted data. Epidemic communication is characterized by the spread of infection without the construction of routing paths. Common wireless network evaluation seeks end-to-end throughput and latency performance. Since radio waves are widely radiated, it is important to improve communication efficiency by expanding the communication area. However, since epidemic communication is carried out locally with many simultaneous connections, the evaluation of the entire network is not important, i.e., there is not always the connection terminals, but data are stored in a buffer and moved, and data are transmitted (infected) when the connection terminals appear. Therefore, communication opportunities occur locally. And, for localized communication, radio wave emissions should be kept as small as possible to minimize radio interference to the surroundings. Ideally, only infected parties passing by should be able to communicate with each other, and radio waves should not reach a large perimeter. Therefore, in this study, we set up a restricted transmission area for local transmission, evaluated the amount of data (amount of infection) that a radio station can transmit while moving within the restricted transmission area, and developed an implementation of the results. The contribution of this study is to discuss epidemic communication for drones to share information in flight, and thereby develop the wireless system that assumes implementation. * The system is designed for practical use, since there are various theoretical studies on epidemic communication, but their applications are not clear. * The main problem solved is to analyze the effect of between-drone interference on the infection rate (data transmission rate), and to propose the optimal transmission method according to the flight speed. * Based on the results of these analyses, we designed functions to be implemented in drones, developed wireless devices, and confirmed their operation through demonstration tests. In the results of this study, we successfully extract issues to be addressed for implementation on drones and developed a wireless system based on the results of demonstration experiments, contributing to the realization of between-drone communications in the future. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we introduce related work on epidemic communication and discuss its implementation challenges. Section 3 describes the implementation method of epidemic communication and presents the interference models and analysis results for the transmitted data volume. Finally, in Section 4, we evaluate the proposed model based on the experimental results and recorded video.