Mobility-Aware Multipath Communication for Unmanned Aerial Surveillance Systems

Abstract

Wireless communication platforms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, usually operate in dynamic conditions with highly fluctuating capacities and erratic wireless access to the network resources. Effective design for adequate, robust, and consistent communications from the drones to the control center (aka server) is thus necessary to facilitate the implementation of the UAV system. Multipath TCP has the potential to exploit heterogeneous wireless paths and achieve robust bandwidth by controlling the dynamics of the convoy of drones. In this paper, we make use of fluid approach for proposing a generic system architecture toward a control mechanism for coordinating the convoy of drones. Moreover, we model multipath TCP and study their applications for the control scenario of a convoy of drones with three different communication interfaces, representing the head, tail, and the middle of the convoy. The access is through a satellite and several WiFi access points (APs) communicating to the server with time-variant wireless channel, subject to the dynamic mobility and distance of APs from the convoy's head and tail. The traffic on different paths governed by the flow control based on the movement and position of the convoy enable us to investigate the performance and convergence of communication system dynamics. In particular, Lyapunov theory is adopted to derive the stability conditions of the dynamics over the mobility of the convoy.