Application-Driven Design of Aerial Communication Networks

Kurzfassung

Networks of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) equipped with various sensors are increasingly used for civil applications, such as monitoring, surveillance, and disaster management. In this article, we discuss the communication requirements raised by applications in MAV networks. We propose a novel system representation that can be used to specify different application demands. To this end, we extract key functionalities expected in an MAV network. We map these functionalities into building blocks to characterize the expected communication needs. Based on insights from own and related real-world experiments we discuss the capabilities of existing communication technologies and their limitations to realize the proposed building blocks. Our findings indicate that, while certain requirements of MAV applications are met with available technologies, further research and development is needed to address the scalability, heterogeneity, safety, quality of service, and security aspects of multi-MAV systems.