Abstract
Communication in remote locations, specially in high-latitude regions, such as the Arctic, is challenged by the lack of infrastructures and by the limited availability of resources. However, these regions have high scientific importance and require efficient ways of transferring research data from different missions and deployed equipment. For this purpose, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as data mules, capable of flying over large distances and retrieving data from remote locations. Despite being a well-known concept, its performance has not been thoroughly evaluated in realistic settings. In this paper, such a solution is evaluated through a field-experiment, exploiting the obtained results to define and implement an emulator for intermittent links. This emulator was designed as a mission planning tool, where we further analyze the impact of different flight trajectories when retrieving data. Additionally, we study the overall performance of 4 well-known file-transferring protocols suitable for a UAV being used as a data mule. Our analysis shows that trajectories at higher altitudes, despite increasing distance between nodes, improves communication performance. Moreover, the obtained results demonstrate that DTN2, using the bundle protocol, outperforms FTP, Rsync, and SCP, and that all these protocols are affected by the size of the files being transferred. These results suggest that, in order for the scientific community to practically use UAVs as data mules, further studies are required, namely on how different UAV trajectories can be combined with efficient file-transferring network protocols and well organized data structures.
Highlights
Scientific expeditions have an important role in the research process conducted in many fields of science
This paper presents an evaluation of data-muling in remote oceanic scenarios, where scientific data should be retrieved from a Research Vessel (R/V)
VALIDATION RESULTS The outcome of the validation process is depicted by FIGURE 9. In this figure the dashed line represents the performance results obtained from the field-experiment, while the solid line corresponds to performance registered by our emulator. These results show that the emulator performs as expected, following the trends in link quality and almost overlapping the real data, obtaining a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 Mbit s−1, which corresponds to 7.15% of the average bitrate
Summary
Scientific expeditions have an important role in the research process conducted in many fields of science. The presented field experiment focuses on a common setup, where a transceiver is located on the deck of a ship, resulting in obstructions to the Line-of-Sight (LOS) due to the ship’s structure (e.g. bridges, cranes and others) In these conditions the communication quality may be intermittent and, it is not trivial to determine how, and how efficiently, data-muling UAVs can be used. This data supports the creation and validation of a network emulator for intermittent links, as well as of an in-depth analysis of common file-transferring network protocols. The obtained results motivate a discussion about how to setup UAVs as data mules and the main concluding thoughts
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