Paving the Way for Civilian Fleets of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Networking Perspective

Abstract

Past experiment-driven research has shown that unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks are challenged by system characteristics of the UAVs. The frame and flight dynamics of micro UAVs may cause wireless signal obstruction, data rate adaptation has not been optimized for the aerial use, and brute-force transmission when coming in range of another UAV is not efficient. Further, in multi-hop UAV networks routing algorithms are affected by mobility-related disconnections. Promising transmission and data forwarding solutions exploit delay-tolerant data dissemination as well as location and movement context of the UAVs. Moreover, UAVs are flying robots that can deliberately move to improve communication quality. The paper provides a summary of major findings in past experiment-driven research extended by a discussion of major system and scaling challenges in UAV fleet communication.