On the Design of the Drone Control Layer

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is a networking architecture born to leverage the huge potential of Internet-connected drones. A key challenge for the IoD is represented by the technological fragmentation of its components. To this end, a middleware solution, namely Drone Control Layer (DCL), is proposed hereby, which enables complex mission design when heterogeneous swarms are considered. The DCL is made of four interfaces which abstract underlying drivers and hardware, provide a set of common primitives to applications, enable communications between drones, and other logical entities. To illustrate its applicability, relevant scenarios of interest are analyzed in details.