Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones have become extremely popular and are used in various commercial applications. When multiple UAVs communicate and work together, they form a UAV network. A private UAV network or Local Area Network of Drones (LoDs) is a special type of UAV network which has the minimum number of UAVs to carry out a certain task. All UAVs in a LoD use the wireless medium to send and receive the data as well as the control signals. An organization or a single owner will be more interested in this type of network, where they want multiple UAVs to scan an area, communicate with each other, and send all the images and live video streams to a single ground station. The currently available commercial UAVs Can send the video signals to and receive control signals only from their own ground station controllers. However, in an LoD network where UAVs are connected in tandem, the UAVs that are in the middle of the network have to carry the control and video signals of other UAVs. Given the limited processing power and dynamic memory capacity of UAVs, this would increase the queuing delays and performance.In this paper, we study the frame formats of existing control, feedback, and data messages of commercial AR UAVs and propose a new approach to construct the payloads of control and feedback frames that are suitable for an LoDs. We compare the performance of our approach of single control and feedback frame for all UAVs in a LoD branch with that of separate control and feedback frames for each UAV. We calculate and compare the UAV node processing delay in both types of signaling mechanisms and show that the single control and feedback frame signaling has less delay on the average.
Highlights
Commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide a variety of services in various domains such as agriculture, surveillance, rescue, and construction
We found the total delay at each UAV node in the Local Area Network of Drones (LoDs) network with the help of Tables 10 and 11
The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the frame rates of the current signaling mechanism in LoDs and proposing a new signaling mechanism to reduce the delay from the ground station to each UAV
Summary
Commercial UAVs provide a variety of services in various domains such as agriculture, surveillance, rescue, and construction. A person may use a UAV to monitor an agricultural farm and receive live streaming videos of the farmland at a ground station [1]. The UAV, in turn, sends the feedback signals and streaming video to the smartphone. In a LoD, there is only one ground station for all UAVs which can be a computer or a smartphone that acts as the controller as well as the video receiver. The control and feedback signal packets used for flying a single UAV has to be studied and should be adapted appropriately to be used in LoD networks. Following a brief discussion of LoD topology, we discuss the signaling protocols used in two popular types of commercial UAVs. In section 4, we introduce the new signaling packets for LoD networks.
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