Software-defined unmanned aerial vehicles networking for video dissemination services

Cluster-Based Control Plane Messages Management in Software-Defined Flying Ad-Hoc Network

“…Zhao et al [12] implemented an SDN-FANET that uses SDN to separate the control and data plane to manage the UAVs in a coordinated manner/way. They focus on the problem of optimal UAV Relay Node placement for real-time video services and collision avoidance by considering global UAV context information, such as UAV position, movement trajectories, and residual energy.…”

“…We considered an SDN architecture applied to FANET, such as introduced by Zhao et al [12]. In this context, SDN-FANET infrastructure is divided into three distinct planes (application, control, and forwarding planes), where each plane can be programmed to meet particular application requirements [12]. The application plane supports different FANET applications, such as surveillance, searching, wildlife tracking, video services, and others.…”

“…The control plane has a controller node responsible to perform all control functions, such as collision manager, routing, topology management, UAVs replacement, and others. Specifically, the controller could be a ground station or a regular UAV node to collect UAV information and send configuration commands periodically [11,12].…”

“…In this way, a decentralized approach [6] to manage FANET include more complexity to synchronize information with all network nodes, requiring more control messages to be transmitted across the FANET, and can increase total power consumption. On the other hand, a centralized UAV controlling system can make optimized decisions based on the global UAV context information [12]. A centralized controller node must deal with the mobility trajectory of UAVs to avoid UAV collisions or improve application performance.…”

“…SDN-FANET provides flexibility to network management, where the network plane can be programmed to meet particular application requirements [16].SDN-FANET controller requires accurate global UAV context information to prevent UAV collisions, optimize the UAVs' movements, establish a routing path, and other decision making tasks [11]. In this way, the controller node must receive UAV context information with low packet loss to be aware of the UAV status for decision making, which is achieved by reliable control message dissemination [12]. However, control message dissemination with low overhead, and high performance is not a trivial task, due to particular characteristics of FANET, i.e., high mobility, failures in UAV to UAV communication, and short communication range [17].…”