Senior Design Team sdmay21-13 • Open-Source Prototyping of 5G Wireless Systems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Communication between vehicles has been shown to have profound potential for improving safety and extending functionality towards true autonomy. Regarding aerial vehicles, the emergence of cellular connected drones has provided potential solutions to scenarios such as smart agriculture, surveillance, and last-mile delivery, where UAVs can operate beyond the line of sight. However, current cellular network architecture is not able to support the connection demands of mission critical communication. Next generation 5G network will provide ultra-reliable, low-latency communication which is a potential solution to the network requirements of such UAV applications.

Figure 1: Key concept sketch.

Project Plan

Our team hopes to deliver a proof of concept simulator consisting of virtual UAVs on a 5G wireless network. Our proposed design consists of integrating an open-source network simulator, OpenAirInterface, with a UAV simulator. Currently, the network simulator only supports single-cell RAN networks, so we will need to develop a multi-cell RAN network simulator on top of the existing project. After we have done this, we will need to feed in location data from a UAV simulator to our multi-cell network simulator to simulate mobility of UAVs on a wireless network. Once we have our integrated simulator, we hope to do research on existing network algorithms and expand upon real-time scheduling solutions relating to inter-vehicle communication networks.

Figure 2: High level design diagram.