IoT-equipped UAV communications with seamless vertical handover

With advancement in the technology and services in different application areas, UAVs have become a strong market share. Applications range from goods delivery, agriculture, surveillance, mining, industrial inspection, disaster management etc. Furthermore, this vast usability of UAVs can be powered by Internet of Things (IoT) and it can offer a new IoT value-added services. UAVs can be referred to as “things in motion” which can be controlled over the Internet and push the sensor data they collect to the cloud services. But this imposes major challenges with high a volume of data transmissions in some applications. Another area of concern is the choice of mode of communication in LOS (Line of Sight) and BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight) where Wi-Fi could have limited accessibility and other modes like satellite communication have higher cost of data transmissions. In this paper, a RESTful approach to connect UAVs with IoT to stream sensor data to cloud services is presented, providing an efficient solution for data management and transmissions by efficiently gathering, filtering and transmitting data on demand to the cloud services. An efficient vertical handover mechanism is also presented between different modes of communication like Wi-Fi and satellite for BLOS communication challenges to increase reliability or reduce cost.