RBESP: Reliable and best effort stack protocol for UAV collaboration with WSN

This paper describes RBESP, a dual stack protocol designed as part of the communication infrastructure of a short-range Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). It aims at providing a reliable communication between the UAV and its base station and a best effort communication between the UAV and a WSN. RBESP targets two distinct communication requirements using the same communication transceiver. The other end of the communication link can be heterogeneous devices transmitting with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which is also used in the UAV transceiver. The paper details the software layers that implement both the reliable communication with the base station and the best-effort communication with the WSN nodes. Two different scenarios were implemented in order to allow RBESP evaluation. The first scenario consists of the UAV node communicating with spatially distributed sensors on the ground. In the second scenario, the UAV node delivers the collected data to the base station. Both communication scenarios are very different in terms of connection time and volume of transmitted data. Obtained results are presented and discussed along the paper.