Evaluating Wifibroadcast for Long-Distance UAV-to-Ground Data Transmission

Abstract

Using existing general purpose wireless technologies, it is difficult to transmit large amounts of data from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to a ground station during flight. Thus, there is a demand for specialized solutions. Wifibroadcast proposes a solution for this use case, utilizing a unidirectional and connectionless design to transmit data using unmodified low-cost WiFi hardware. In this paper, we measure and evaluate the performance of Wifibroadcast for UAV to ground transmissions over large distances and provide a direct comparison against standard IEEE 802.11. We demonstrate that Wifibroadcast is able to outperform WiFi in all tested scenarios while identifying specific characteristics, limitations, and requirements of a long-distance transmission on both the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz frequency bands.