A quality of experience model for live video in first-person-view drone control in cellular networks

Abstract

Several upcoming 5G and 6G services will rely on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) sending live information to remote terminals. Thus, understanding the traffic flows that might influence end-user experience in these services is key for cellular network operators. One of these UAV-based services is first person view (FPV) drone control, consisting on the remote control of the UAV in Beyond Visual Line of Sight scenarios using only the live video visualized in a ground control station. This work focuses on the networking aspects of this service by presenting the assembly, integration and evaluation methodology of an UAV quadrotor teleoperated via FPV through a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network or WiFi radio access link. To assess system performance, three different connectivity schemes between UAV and ground control station are tested, namely server-based connection via LTE, direct LTE, and peer-to-peer WiFi connection. Then, several experiments are carried out in the testbed to characterize telemetry, control and video traffic for FPV service in the above schemes. Later, a methodology is defined to estimate Quality of Experience (QoE) for FPV service based on image quality and video latency measurements collected at network and application level. Results show that the QoE model for live video introduced in this work can be the basis of more sophisticated models for cellular FPV services.