I don't think communication protocols are a good metaphor because they can be stateless. You can drop packets and it does matter! A better way to think about

I don't think communication protocols are a good metaphor because they can be stateless. You can drop packets and it does matter! A better way to think about it is as a shared data structure. It is a 3d vector space with some attributes that help predict the future. Each drone has a different version of this data structure in memory. The data structure has an initial state at take-off and is updated using radio communication and sensor data. If the data structure is perfectly synchronised then planning is easy. There is plenty of sky and simple rules can be applied. But it never will be perfectly synchronised. in that sense it is like a globally distributed database. The data structure may have been edited by another drone and the change not communicated. You may have lost communication and not even realised. Local conditions may have reduced GPS quality giving you false location information. So perhaps an interesting metaphor is concurrency control. Do we lock airspace or can we have transactions? Can we partition or shard the airspace? When is consistent state required?