A UAV-Based Content Delivery Architecture for Rural Areas and Future Smart Cities

Abstract

Content delivery in vehicular environments can serve multiple purposes, such as safety, entertainment, and news delivery that can be geographically relevant to vehicles traveling within a certain area. The traditional approach to address this problem, based on fixed networking infrastructure, suffers from the following two drawbacks: First, the efficient delivery of large-sized contents to multiple moving receivers simultaneously can be hard to achieve, and second, most of the roads outside the main urban areas lack such fixed infrastructures due to economic reasons. In this paper, we tackle both these issues by proposing rapidly deployable wireless access infrastructures combining RaptorQ-protected content diffusion and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We performed experiments using actual vehicles and UAVs, and our results showed that RaptorQ-based content dissemination mechanisms is highly efficient when transmitting to multiple moving receivers simultaneously, and UAVs can serve as cheap, effective, and rapidly deployable mobile wireless access elements.