An Open Source and System-Level Simulator for the Internet of Drones

The Internet of Drones (IoD) represents a key enabling paradigm for the Internet of Mobile Things. By offering smart interactions among unmanned aerial vehicles, i.e., drones, it promises to support many advanced services, spanning from control signaling and traffic management to real-time applications and multimedia streaming. From a networking perspective, IoD should face heterogeneous architectures and extremely dynamics topologies, while ensuring the different levels of quality of service expected for the enabled applications. In this context, the definition of novel communication protocols and algorithms must be properly supported by valid instruments able to model the overall network architecture, as well as to evaluate and improve its performance. To meet these goals, this work proposes an open source and system-level simulator for the IoD. Developed on top of the well-known Network Simulator 3, it implements the key networking elements (drones, network access points, and Zone Service Provider), a standard-compliant communication stack based on the IEEE 802.11 technology, and scenarios with various mobility model. Thanks to its native modularity, the simulator is ready to be used for investigating the performance of customizable scenarios with a variable number of drones, and can be easily extended with new functionalities.