Transmission quality evaluation of multistreaming video data from the UAV to the ground station in network simulator 3 simulation environment using WI-FI standards

Abstract

The article presents the results of transmitting video data simulation in real time from video cameras on board Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to a ground station (GS). The main purpose of the article was to evaluate the impact of the flying source node number on Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, such as Packet Delivery Ratio and Goodput at OSI model application layer. A scenario was considered when hovering over UAVs, in the zone of reliable communication, transmitted a stream of video data to a ground station, then the distance between the UAV and the GS increased to repeat the experiment. The bitrate was maintained at the same level, close to the bitrate of real high-definition video. The experiment was carried out in the Network Simulator 3 (NS-3) simulation environment for scenarios with one, two, four, and eight source nodes. Simulation results have shown the negative impact of the increasing the number of flying source nodes on Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as Packet Delivery Rate (PDR) and Goodput. Recommendations regarding the applicability of different standards of the 802.11 family to scenarios for using UAVs in the multistreaming video data transmission mode are given. A change in the relationship of useful throughput on the number of source nodes by 15 % was also found.