Wireless Communication Infrastructure for a Short-Range Unmanned Aerial

This paper describes a low cost wireless communication infrastructure designed for a short-range Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). It aims at providing a communication link between the UAV and a base station and also additional links that may allow collecting data from a remote Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The challenge here is using the same hardware to communicate with potential heterogeneous devices and using different protocols. The paper details the software layer designed to support a reliable communication with the base station, as well a highly efficient best-effort communication with nodes from a WSN. For both cases, a single IEEE 802.15.4 extended range transceiver is used. To demonstrate the proposed infrastructure, two different utilization scenarios were implemented and tested. The first consists of the UAV node communicating with spatially distributed sensors on the ground. In the second scenario, the UAV node delivers the collected data to the base station. Both communication scenarios are very different in terms of connection time and other communication requirements. Obtained results show that the proposed solution attends the related challenges.