Remote Tracking of UAV Swarms via 3D Mobility Models and LoRaWAN Communications

Abstract

Over the last few years, the many uses of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have captured the interest of both the scientific and the industrial communities. A typical scenario consists in the use of UAVs for surveillance or target-search missions over a wide geographical area. In this case, it is fundamental for the command center to accurately estimate and track the trajectories of the UAVs by exploiting their periodic state reports. In this work, we design an ad hoc tracking system that exploits the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) standard for communication and an extended version of the Constant Turn Rate and Acceleration (CTRA) motion model to predict drone movements in a 3D environment. We analyze the trade-off in setting the main parameters of the communication system and Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) scheme, showing how our tracking system can handle large swarms of drones at distances up to 4 km. Simulation results on a publicly available dataset show that our system can reliably estimate the position and trajectory of a swarm of UAVs, significantly outperforming baseline tracking approaches.