Effect of UAV Flight Characteristics to Mobile Network Quality for UAV BVLOS Operations

Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations are crucial for enabling the drone industry’s upcoming phase of UAV commercial acceleration. One of requirements to support BVLOS operations in UAV is mobile network with proper connectivity. In this study, the effect of UAV flight characteristic (altitude, attitude, and speed) to mobile network quality for UAV BVLOS operations will be analyzed. However, due to the time limitation of the publication, only preliminary results are presented. First, general technical framework including hardware, software, the data stream, and network coverage is described in the methodology. Then, a prototype UAV equips with Raspberry Pi and 4G connectivity is developed. A ground test is conducted to test functionality of the system. The preliminary result shows that the framework system functioning well in terms of transfer and receive data with the average latency 40 milliseconds. Next step, the flight test will be conducted to measure the effect of the UAV flight characteristics on the mobile network quality.