Swarm Network-as-a-Service (SNaaS)

Abstract

Emerging on-demand connectivity scenarios increasingly require networking solutions with stringent service-level guarantees. We propose Swarm Network-as-a-Service (SNaaS), a service-oriented framework that leverages fleets of drones to provide on-demand connectivity at scale. SNaaS explicitly models drone-to-device and drone-to-drone interactions as composable services, enabling consumers to request connectivity through Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). We formalize atomic and composite SNaaS services, present an SDN-inspired architecture that integrates the service-oriented triad of provider, consumer, and registry. We introduce a composition framework that orchestrates drones into end-to-end services. Within this framework, we define and analyze three composition strategies, i.e., direct, clustered, and parallel, and propose a queuing-theory-based heuristic for selecting the most suitable strategy under varying load conditions. A dedicated enforcement module continuously monitors queue stability and SLA latency, adaptively reconfiguring the swarm when violations occur. Experiments using real air-to-ground measurements show that the framework consistently outperforms fixed compositions, achieving lower latency, fewer SLA violations, and smoother adaptation as load and swarm size increase.

12 pages, 12 figures. This is an accepted paper and it is going to appear in the Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2026)