Comparison of communication protocols for UAVs and VANETs

This decade sees a growing number of applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones. UAVs are now being experimented for commercial applications in public areas as well as used in private environments such as in farming. As such, the development of efficient communication protocols for UAVs is of much interest. This paper compares and contrasts recent communication protocols of UAVs with that of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) using Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) protocol stack as the reference model. The paper also identifies the importance of developing light-weight communication protocols for certain applications of UAVs as they can be both of low processing power and limited battery energy.