Implementation for UAVs Aided Edge Sensing System in Wireless Emergency Communications

Abstract

Disaster environmental data sensing plays an important role in ensuring the timeliness of emergency rescue. Combining mobile edge caching and mobile edge computing (MEC)function, this paper proposes an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)aided edge sensing system (UESS)in wireless emergency communications, where UAVs with flexibility and mobility work as edge servers for flexible data sensing. This system is developed and implemented involving the UESS server in the cloud, the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)server, and the UAV servers at the edge. Besides, this system implements rapid network deployment of UAVs with three protocols of IEEE 802.11. In the case of natural disasters even when the communication infrastructures are damaged in whole or in part, the proposed UESS can be rapidly deployed to provide network access and expand the coverage of the network. Moreover, this system can also accurately sense disaster scenarios' information data, such as video data and sensor data, as well as the capability data of UAVs in terms of computation, caching, and energy resources. The experimental results show that the UESS system not only can reduce the size of transmission data uploaded to the UESS server, but also can achieve the low transmission latency between UAVs at the edge.