System Design of an Open-Source Cloud-Based Framework for Internet of Drones Application

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are increasingly gaining interest in Internet of Drones (IoD) applications for automatizing the labor-intensive tasks. They are used in various areas such as infrastructure inspection. However, UAVs have limited energy resources and computational processing capabilities, which prevents them from running applications onboard and accessing the internet for gaining knowledge about their mission. In order to address these challenges imposed by limited resource on the drone, we propose a new cloud system infrastructure for building open-source IoD applications. We have designed a client-server architecture which hosts the drone as a client and the cloud as a scalable server. For validating the developed IoD application, an open-source drone simulator and flight controller are adopted to perform the tests. The overall architecture of a drone-cloud framework is presented along with a use case to show the applicability of the proposed framework.