Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX for long distance control of UAV swarms

The IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard allows for a wide variety of different application. Especially in cases where people rely on high speed network access in greater areas which is exclusively dedicated to them mobile WiMAX is a viable solution. One of these scenarios is the control of a swarm of miniature unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAV). These flying robots can be used for a wide set of different applications which range from airborne surveillance to traffic control and more. In the AirShield project [1], sponsored by the German Ministry for Education and Research, the MUAV swarm is used to measure the concentration of different harmful substances which occur in the case of fire or a malfunction in industrial facilities. Due to the fact that the clouds of contaminant may travel over several of kilometers a reliable communication system which can handle these distances and furthermore ensures some QoS guarantees is needed. In this paper we investigate in how far mobile WiMAX can ensure these guarantees in terms of packet loss, delay, jitter and throughput under different channel conditions. Therefore a laboratory testbed based on the E6651 mobile WiMAX base station emulator by Agilent Technologies is used for the different measurements.