Design and PoC Implementation of Mmwave-Based Offloading-Enabled UAV Surveillance System

Among UAV applications, real-time high-resolution video surveillance systems using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) especially gain our research interests, because high mobilities of UAVs and high qualities of videos can dramatically improve the surveillance performance and evolve the system, especially for artificial intelligence (AI)-based monitoring systems. However, it is challenging to transmit high-resolution videos to ground station in real-time and also impossible to perform AI detection based on these videos on UAVs. To address the challenges, we propose to take full advantages of mmWave communications and to apply it into UAV-based surveillance systems to transmit ultra-high-quality and ultra-high-resolution uncompressed 4 K videos. To increase energy efficiency of UAVs, we propose to offload all computations via mmWave from UAVs to ground station. Moreover, in addition to design of system architecture, proof-of-concept (PoC) prototype hardware of the proposed system is practically developed to demonstrate technical feasibilities of mmWave communication on UAVs and the enhancements to practical surveillance applications. The practical issues in the implementation and the necessary hardware/software applied in the prototype system are explained in detail in this paper. An outdoor PoC experiment is conducted, and the experimental results are consistent with design, so that the effectiveness of the system is confirmed.