Design and instrumentation of a multi-radio access technology (multiRAT) system for UAVs

Abstract

Unmanned Airial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly important and are commonly seen as one of the critical enablers of the future industrial and smart city applications. At the very same time, the proliferation of UAVs introduces security and safety challenges. An efficient connectivity ecosystem around the UAV must be established to address these challenges. Along this vision, the thesis focuses on designing, instrumenting, and demonstrating a multi-radio access technology system to be deployed on a UAV, enabling provisioning connectivity for the UAV itself as well as allowing it to connect to other IoT devices around it. At minimum, the developed system has to include three radio access technologies (RATs), namely (i) Fifth Generation (5G) cellular (enabling UAV to operate as 5G User Equipment (UE)), (ii) Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) (gateway to receive data from other IoT devices) and, optionally, as end node, (iii) Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in scanner mode (to receive data sent in advertisement packets by other IoT devices and/or UAVs). The thesis will include (a) the design of the respective multi-radio access technology system’s architecture and justification of the design and components selection, (b) instrumentation of the physical prototype, and (c) development of the demonstrator, testing and measuring the relevant key performance metrics related to connectivity (e.g., throughput, latency, and energy consumption).