IoT in the Air: Thread-Enabled Flying IoT Network for Indoor Environments

In this work, we address the problem ofconnecting an Internet of Flying Things (IoFT) network in a robust, reliable,and resilient manner. Such a network is apt for the indoor use cases where notonly we need fast network establishment but, the network should also be able toseamlessly adapt to frequent topology changes and power-efficient as well. Webuild an indoor IoFT prototype with CrazyFlie 2.1 drones that are speciallyequipped with NRF52840 chips capable of operating with the latest IoT standard– Thread. We evaluate the prototype for networking metrics such as, latency andthroughput. Our initial evaluation reveals that this novel flying multihop mesharchitecture can support up to 50 Kbps of throughput with the average latency30 ms. We quantify network resilience with the time taken for a new route totake effect in the event of losing the previous connection. Our experimentsreveal that the network restores within a minimum of 5 seconds in case of apartial node failure to a maximum of 30 seconds in case of a complete failure.