Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have progressively been integrated into people lives during the last years. It is quite common now to see UAVs flying in the countryside doing field inspection, in highways for traffic control operations, or above stadiums in sport and music events. It is also common to see spectacular UAV swarm showcases (in most cases they are just performing a choreography) showing the potential of upcoming technologies. This article is focused on multi-UAV scenarios, on the establishment of Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs), and on the integration of 5G technologies like Network Function Virtualization (NFV) or Software Defined Networking (SDN). In particular, this article presents a proposal for one of the most common problems that the research and development community has to face at some stage: the validation of the different solutions and deployments. In this area, there is currently a notorious gap between the design phase and the deployment phase, since traditional network simulators are not designed with the constraints imposed by UAVs in mind. Besides, services implementations (that are usually distributed into single-board computers carried as payloads by UAVs) cannot be easily combined with the simulators. VENUE (Virtualized Environment for multi-UAV network emulation) is presented as an experimentation platform that allows testing the integration of multi-UAV FANETs together with network services deployments. VENUE covers from the simulation/emulation phase up to the real equipment integration phase. The validation of the platform is also presented in this article through several UAV use cases that make use of NFV technologies.
Highlights
According to the Aerospace Forecast report provided in [1] by the U.S Federal Aviation, nowadays, most commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) missions are devoted to research and development or training and education
Many research challenges are mainly focused on multi-UAV service provisioning whose communications are intrinsically related to the different Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANET) proposals
This solution is built on top of Linux Containers (LXC) and the ns-3 network simulator, and provides an emulation framework that allows the integration of different Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), which can be later used into real Small UAV (SUAV) hardware, together with a network simulator
Summary
According to the Aerospace Forecast report provided in [1] by the U.S Federal Aviation, nowadays, most commercial UAV missions are devoted to research and development or training and education. The environment for service provisioning that multi-UAV systems are showing is a appropriate context for the 5G softwarization technologies such as the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) (enabling a faster and more flexible deployment of network services), or Software Defined Networking (SDN) (enabling an easier network configuration and reducing the operational costs) It is still an emerging research area, but there are already different articles showing the potential and the challenges of these 5G solutions [13]–[16]. Taking into account the aforementioned considerations, this article presents an open-source validation platform for multi-UAV and FANET scenarios where different services based on 5G programmable UAVs can be deployed and tested This solution is built on top of Linux Containers (LXC) and the ns-3 network simulator (based on [17]), and provides an emulation framework that allows the integration of different Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) (or virtual entities in general), which can be later used into real SUAV hardware, together with a network simulator (used to emulate the specific characteristics of wireless channels).
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