Flight mission-based service orchestration in UAVs

Drones proliferation into multiple areas has become apparent, due to their ability to go anywhere without having to worry about terrain constraints and dangerous substances, and their offering of advantageous points of view. One area in which their use is being vastly explored is aiding in emergency situations, like supporting emergency infrastructures. In these scenarios they are used to deploy a plenitude of services, such as video streaming, communications access points, sensor gathering. All these services need to be maintained as a mission progresses. There is, however, a separation between the management of these services and the system that controls the drones. This lack of synchronization between all systems involved leads to more time being splurged on prepping the services, with the deployments having to be done manually.This paper proposes to bridge these systems together. It uses a mission planning framework that is able to control fleets of drones. The service management is done through Kubernetes, and the synchronization is achieved via an intermediary entity that allows the mission planning framework to interact with the Kubernetes cluster. With this approach, the setup of the services can be performed dynamically and according to the mission requirements, which can change over time. The proposed approach is evaluated both with respect to its scalability and to the Kubernetes performance, including the costs associated to its use. The results show that the approach is scalable and can indeed improve the downtime of the services.