A Hybrid Wi-Fi–ESB Communication Architecture for Scalable Distributed Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems

The widespread adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across commercial, civilian, and military applications has raised critical security concerns due to the increasing prevalence of unauthorized and malicious UAV operations. These threats have driven the need for effective counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS). Ground-based C-UAS systems face the challenges of large-area coverage and scalability. This paper proposes a hybrid communication architecture for distributed ground-based C-UAS that enables extended-range, low-latency, and scalable operation with sparsely deployed sensors. The proposed architecture leverages Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB) for energy-efficient, low-latency communication in the access network, while employing long-range communication technology (Wi-Fi), in the backhaul network. Field testing using the PROTON Lab wireless nodes is conducted to analyze the proposed hybrid Wi-Fi-ESB network to analyze the reliability and end-to-end latency under different network topologies. The results demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves reliable and low-latency communication for large-scale applications such as C-UAS. The implementation codebase and datasets are made publicly available to facilitate further research in the area.