UAV-based Networked Airborne Computing Simulator and Testbed Design and Implementation

The integration of onboard computing capabilities with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has gained significant attention in recent years as part of mobile computing paradigms such as mobile edge computing (MEC), fog computing, and mobile cloud computing. To enhance the performance of airborne computing, networked airborne computing (NAC) aims to interconnect UAVs through direct flight-to-flight links, with UAVs sharing resources with each other. However, despite the growing interest in NAC and UAV-based computing, existing studies rely heavily on numerical simulations for performance evaluation and lack realistic simulators and hardware testbeds. To fill this gap, this paper presents the development of two NAC platforms: a realistic simulator based on ROS and Gazebo, and a hardware testbed with multiple UAVs communicating and sharing computing resources. Through simulation and real flight tests with two computation applications, we evaluate the platforms and examine the impact of mobility on NAC performance. Our findings offer valuable insights into NAC and provide guidance for future advancements.