A Quality of Experience Evaluation Methodology for First-Person-View Drone Control in Cellular Networks

Several upcoming 5G and 6G services will rely on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) sending live information to remote terminals in Beyond Visual Line of Sight scenarios. Thus, understanding the traffic flows in these services that might influence end-user experience is key for network operators. One of these services is first person view drone control, consisting on the remote control of the UAV by the live video visualized in a ground control station. This work presents the assembly, integration and evaluation methodology of an UAV quadrotor connected to a wireless network Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network and WiFi radio interfaces. To assess latency, three different connectivity options between UAV and ground control station have been tested, namely connection via LTE server-based, LTE and peer-to-peer WiFi connection. Then, several experiments are carried out to characterize telemetry, control and video traffic for FPV service over the above schemes. Later, a methodology is defined to estimate Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for this service based on objective image quality and latency measurements collected at network and application level. Results show that the QoE assessment methodology introduced in this work is consistent as a basis to define QoE models for cellular network management.