Abstract
With the increasing availability of unmanned aircraft systems, their usage for search and rescue is close at hand. Especially in the maritime context, aerial support can yield significant benefits. This article proposes and evaluates the concept of combining multiple cellular networks for highly reliable communication with those aircraft systems. The proposed approach is experimentally validated in several unprecedented large-scale experiments in the maritime context. It is found that in this scenario, conventional methods do not suffice for reliable connectivity to the aircraft with significantly varying overall availabilities between 68% and 97%. The underlying work, however, overcomes the limitations of single-link connectivity by providing availability of up to 99.8% in the analyzed scenarios. Therefore, the approach and the experimental data presented in this work yield a solid contribution to search and rescue drones. All results and flight recording data sets are published along with this article to enable future related work and studies, external reproduction, and validation of the underlying results and findings.
Highlights
The recently growing availability and fast-paced development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have widened their area of application
Despite packet loss occurring only rarely due to Long Term Evolution (LTE)’s HARQ mechanism, the communication link may be unavailable if there is no available enhanced NodeB (eNB) to connect to, the signal quality is too bad, or the LTE modem is performing a handshake between two eNBs
The system has been evaluated in several flight tests using an Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) in several scenarios and all recorded data sets have been published alongside this publication
Summary
The recently growing availability and fast-paced development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have widened their area of application One of these fields is the support of Search and Rescue (SAR). The challenges of UAS usage in maritime SAR scenarios lie in the remote control as well as the real-time exchange of acquired information like sensor data, videos, and images. Drones 2020, 4, 16 two require low latency and high reliability, whereas the latter one conditions a real-time and high-throughput data flow To tackle those challenges, the underlying publication proposes a holistic communication framework. This is followed by a description of the evaluated scenarios and published datasets (Section 4).
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