Reliable Optical Wireless Links within UAV Swarms

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flying in swarm formations carrying a variety of sensors for monitoring and surveillance is in fact a future application for both civil and military use. Different requirements of guidance and control of UAV were already identified; however, the communication facilities between mobile platforms and air-to-ground links are restricted to low bit rate radio based technology. In the near term data rates in the area of 100 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s will be needed to handle multiple sensor information in real-time and in parallel. Thus, UAV equipped with free space optics (FSO) will emerge as a challenging new needs for large data transfer in real time. With data rate capabilities of up to 2.5 Gbit/s the FSO surpass all possible microwave and RF solutions