UAVs Traffic Control Based on Multi-Access Edge Computing

Abstract

Given the continuously increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in different domains, their management in the uncontrolled airspace has become a necessity. This has given rise to new systems called UAVs Traffic Management (UTM) systems. Nevertheless, currently, there is a lack of communication infrastructures that can support the requirements of UTM systems. Luckily, the envisioned 5G mobile network has introduced the concept of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) in its architecture to support mission-critical applications by decreasing the end-to-end latency and the unreliability of communication. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the network latency and reliability on the control of UAVs' flights. The obtained results show that a UAV can deviate from its intended path with more than 5m if the network latency exceeds 400ms and with more than 2m if the packet loss probability exceeds 0.2. To overcome these limitations, we have leveraged MEC to provide a new UTM framework that enables an efficient traffic management. Moreover, due to MEC resource-limited nature and in order to give an insight about the resource provisioning, we have evaluated the scalability of the proposed solution in terms of the number of UAVs that can be handled without affecting the efficiency of the proposed UTM framework.

An Efficient and Provably Secure Certificateless Blind Signature Scheme for Flying Ad-Hoc Network Based on Multi-Access Edge Computing

“…MEC can solve the problem of latency resulting from long communication distance. So far, studies have been conducted to examine the usage of edge computing for UAVs [23][24][25]. However, the studies do not discuss the topic of communication link quality.…”

Towards Efficient Control of Mobile Network-Enabled UAVs

“…Case where v is a UE: In this case,γ uv is provided in (4). The moment generating function (MGF) and the PDF of γ uv can be obtained as…”

“…In the literature, some works have studied the use of edge computing for UAVs (e.g., [4]- [6]). However, the communication link quality is not the focus of those works.…”

Internet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—A Multilayer Low-Altitude Airspace Model for Distributed UAV Traffic Management

“…Recently becoming an important research topic, with the expected large airspace traffic demand, dynamic geo-fencing and intrusion detection requirements, the currently under-development constructs, like NASA UTM [16] and EU U-Space [17] to name a few, will eventually face limitations in scalability and resilience due to their ATM–comparable centralised architecture. On the contrary, a distributed UTM relying on local decisions and ad-hoc UAV-to-UAV and UAV-to-infrastructure communications would reduce latency by allowing UAVs to exchange the more frequent awareness messages directly as explained in Reference [15], utilising paradigms such as multi-access edge computing [18]. Hence, achieving scalability and better resilience [19].…”