A Low-Latency Reliable Transport Solution for Network-Connected UAV

Abstract

Existing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) mainly rely on the direct ground-to-UAV communications over the unlicensed spectrum, which can only operate within the visual line of sight. Integrating UAVs into cellular networks is a promising solution to extend the range but poses new challenges to the transport protocols. To ensure the flight safety, the transmission of UAV commands and missionrelated data is required to be reliable with low latency. In this paper, we propose a Low-latency Reliable Transmission (LRT) protocol by exploiting the rateless and online properties of online network coding. We design the LRT, implement it, and evaluate its performance in terms of the in-order per message delay. Experimental results show that LRT can provide lowlatency transmission service comparable to that of UDP while giving the same reliability of TCP, which makes it an attractive option for Network-Connected UAV applications.