Analysis and proposal of strategies for the management of drone swarms through Wi-Fi technologies

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the benefits of combining two radio interfaces onboard an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to communicate with a ground control station (GCS) and other UAVs inside a swarm. The goals are to use the IEEE 802.11ah standard (Wi-Fi HaLow) combined with the IEEE 802.11ax specification (Wi-Fi 6/6E) to enable real-time video transmission from UAVs to the GCS. While airport runway inspection serves as the proof-of-concept use case, the proposed multi-hop architectures apply to other medium-range UAV operations (i.e., a few kilometers) requiring real-time video transmission, such as natural disaster relief and agricultural monitoring. Several scenarios in which a UAV swarm performs infrastructure inspection are emulated. During the missions, UAVs have to send real-time video to the GCS through a multi-hop network when some damage in the infrastructure is found. The different scenarios are studied by means of emulation. Emulated scenarios are defined using different network architectures and radio technologies. Once the emulations finish, different performance metrics related to time, energy and the multi-hop video transmission network are analyzed. The capacity of a multi-hop network is a limiting factor for the transmission of high-quality video. As a first contribution, an expression to find this capacity from distances between UAVs in the emulated scenario is found using the NS-3 simulator. Then, this expression is applied in the algorithms in charge of composing the multi-hop network to offer on-demand quality video. However, the main contribution of this work lies in the development of efficient mechanisms for exchanging control information between UAVs and the GCS, and for forming a multi-hop network to transmit video.

This research was funded in part by the Spanish MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ FEDER/UEthrough projects PID2019-106808RA-I00 and PID2023-146378NB-I00, and by Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del departament d’Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya with the grant number 2021 SGR 00330.

9 - Indústria, Innovació i Infraestructura

7 - Energia Assequible i No Contaminant

11 - Ciutats i Comunitats Sostenibles

Postprint (published version)