Autonomous Flying WiFi Access Point

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aka drones, are widely used civil and commercial applications. A promising one is to use the drones as relying nodes to extend the wireless coverage. However, existing solutions only focus on deploying them to predefined locations. After that, they either remain stationary or only move in predefined trajectories throughout the whole deployment. In the open outdoor scenarios such as search and rescue or large music events, etc., users can move and cluster dynamically. As a result, network demand will change constantly over time and hence will require the drones to adapt dynamically.In this paper, we present a proof of concept implementation of an UAV access point (AP) which can dynamically reposition itself depends on the users movement on the ground. Our solution is to continuously keeping track of the received signal strength from the user devices for estimating the distance between users devices and the drone, followed by trilateration to localise them. This process is challenging because our on-site measurements show that the heterogeneity of user devices means that change of their signal strengths reacts very differently to the change of distance to the drone AP. Our initial results demonstrate that our drone is able to effectively localise users and autonomously moving to a position closer to them.Index Terms-UAV access point, Flying access point, Drone based user localisation

A survey of prototype and experiment for UAV communications

“…For commercial UAVs today, WiFi is the most popular communication technology [28][29][30], which usually operates at unlicensed band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz) and is supported by many commercial companies and open source projects, owing to the cost, regulation, and compatibility considerations. The technology is based on the IEEE 802.11 standards and utilizes the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) collision avoidance mechanism.…”

“…WiFi equipment can be directly obtained off-the-shelf without the need for new design and modification. In [28], a design and implementation of flying WiFi access point was presented by using commercial components including Raspberry Pi, Crius CN-06 GPS module, DJI 2312E motors, One Pro Flight Controller, and DJI F450 frame. The tests were performed at a outdoor park.…”

“…From the perspective of academia research, a few measurements were performed [19,28,87]. In [28], the authors implemented a UAV access point which can adaptively adjust their position depending on the movement of the ground users. They continuously kept track of the RSS from the ground users for the estimated distance between UAV and ground users.…”

A Survey of Prototype and Experiment for UAV Communications

“…For commercial UAVs today, WiFi is the most popular communication technology [33][34][35], which usually operates at unlicensed band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz) and is supported by many commercial companies and open source projects, due to the cost, regulation, and compatibility considerations. The technology is based on the IEEE 802.11 standards and utilizes the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) collision avoidance mechanism.…”

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Based 3D Trajectory Design in Aerial-Terrestrial Wireless Caching Networks

“…Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial BSs [2] in which popular contents can be cached provide several benefits to the cellular network. Firstly, UAVs can provide wider wireless coverage due to high line-of-sight (LoS) probabilities at high altitudes [3].…”