On the Involvement of IEEE 802.11ah Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Emergency Networks

In this work, a practical evaluation for IEEE 802.11ah enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is carried out. The proposed aerial devices can be involved and help significantly in dealing with natural disasters, by providing extended network capabilities in long distances. The major advantages of those developed emergency networks are indicatively the easy deployment, the low power consumption and the dynamic wide extension. In contrast with prior approaches which solely based on simulations, in this work the experiments are conducted with the use of real IEEE 802.11ah network adapters and drones. Finally, the examined experimental scenarios reveal the realistic limits of the aforementioned wireless protocol, which constitutes the main criterion for whether this can be used in emergency scenarios.