Design and Simulation of Smart Communication System for Unmanned Arial Vehicles

Abstract

In recent years, the use of drones has drastically increased as the evolution of drone use in commercial sectors and reduced costs of the hardware. Earlier drone services were mostly used for military operations but nowadays the Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAV) system is very advanced and its applications are not limited to military operations. The recent years have also witnessed a network evolution of UAVs from single ground to air network to multi-UAV network systems along with usage of wireless public networks like LTE which can act as UAV communication channel. In the proposed project, a communication system used in the UAS system is simulated to analyze the UAV behavior under different conditions with respect to mission planning and the communication networks used. A comprehensive study is done on communication networks used in controlling UAVs. For a safer approach, the proposed model is simulated using available software instead of hardware implementations. ArduPilot SITL, MAVProxy and Mission Planner are used to simulate the UAV system virtually. Whereas network simulations of Wi-Fi and LTE network are done with the help of NS-3 on a separate platform. Various network parameters like network delay, throughput, etc., are graphically represented.