As urban skies populate with logistics and inspection drones, classical ground-controlled telemetry saturates. This paper demonstrates 3GPP Rel-17 direct PC5 sidelink performance in autonomous swarm flight.
Empirical flight trials confirm that direct sidelink achieves 2.8 ms latency at ranges up to 1.5 km between moving aircraft, maintaining 99.99% packet delivery ratios under dynamic banking angles.
By exchanging Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) extended with 3D velocity vectors, swarm agents compute velocity-obstacle cones locally without relying on centralized cloud dispatchers.