Cognitive radio as solution for ground-aerial surveillance through WSN and UAV infrastructure

Intelligent collaborative environments, where heterogenous entities operate together in achieving common mission objectives have been increasingly adopted for monitoring and surveillance of interest areas and physical infrastructures. They can be assembled from multiple existing technologies ranging from wireless sensor networks (WSN), terrestrial remote operated vehicles (ROV) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). In this context, we first introduce a multi-level system framework for multi-sensory robotic surveillance of critical infrastructure protection through communication, data acquisition and processing - MUROS. Leveraging a cognitive radio (CR) scheme is discussed as key point of the paper, arguing that by exploiting in an opportunistic fashion the time, frequency and spatial stream of the wireless environment, increased communication reliability can be achieved with positive impact on the availability and service level at each hierarchical level. The application of CR, given the heterogeneous nature of the application across multiple radio interfaces and protocols, stand outs as a novel and feasible research direction. We argument the advantages of this scheme within the constraints of a working scenario and define a simulation-based approach in order to validate our solution.