Abstract
With the advent of 5G technologies, vertical markets have been placed at the forefront, as fundamental drivers and adopters of technical developments and new business models. Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are gaining traction in multiple vertical sectors, as key assets to generate, process, and distribute relevant information for the provision of value-added services. However, the enormous potential of SUAVs to support a flexible, rapid, and cost-effective deployment of vertical applications is still to be exploited. In this paper, we leverage our prior work on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and SUAVs to design and build a multi-site experimentation testbed based on open-source technologies. The goal of this testbed is to explore synergies among NFV, SUAVs, and vertical services, following a practical approach primarily governed by experimentation. To verify our testbed design, we realized a reference use case where a number of SUAVs, cloud infrastructures, and communication protocols are used to provide a multi-site vertical service. Our experimentation results suggest the potential of NFV and SUAVs to flexibly support vertical services. The lessons learned have served to identify missing elements in our NFV platform, as well as challenging aspects for potential improvement. These include the development of specific mechanisms to limit processing load and delays of service deployment operations.
Highlights
The combination of 5G communications and Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) has recently turned out to be more than just a trendy idea
On the other hand, such a logic could enable the flexible interconnection of SUAVs to build programmable aerial networks, which could be rapidly deployed over delimited geographic areas
In a prior work [3] we explored the utilization of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), a key technology in 5G networking, to provide such programmable logic
Summary
The combination of 5G communications and Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) has recently turned out to be more than just a trendy idea. On the other hand, such a logic could enable the flexible interconnection of SUAVs to build programmable aerial networks, which could be rapidly deployed over delimited geographic areas Based on these observations, in a prior work [3] we explored the utilization of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), a key technology in 5G networking, to provide such programmable logic. We gave the first steps towards validating the practical feasibility of this approach, showcasing the deployment of a functional IP telephony service over a set of NFV-enabled SUAVs. This paper continues the abovementioned research line, studying the feasibility of utilizing programmable SUAVs to support heterogenous vertical services.
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