UAV Virtualization for Enabling Heterogeneous and Persistent UAV-as-a-Service

In this paper, we propose an architecture for UAV virtualization with the primary aim of providing virtualized UAV services to multiple users by envisioning the concept of UAV-as-a-Service. In contrast to traditional UAVs, which are resource-constraint in nature and exhibit shorter flight times, our proposed UAV virtualization overcomes the limitations of short flight time of traditional UAVs, in turn allowing them to provide persistent and ubiquitous services. We achieve the virtualization of a UAV through multiple collaborating real-life UAVs performing various tasks in tandem. In this work, we focus on the placement and selection of UAVs to achieve virtualization. We use a social welfare-based approach to select suitable UAVs, from the available ones, and map the UAV to a virtual one. This work enables the provision of different UAV services to multiple end-users, without actual procurement of the UAVs by the end-users. We compare the results for optimal placement, normal maximum energy-based UAV selection, and Atkinson-based selection method. We also compare the virtual model and simple UAV-to-task model to physical UAV usage, task completion ratio, and residual energy of the system. Our proposed model outperforms the traditional model with a task completion efficiency of 94.26%. The residual energy of the system also increases with an increase in the number of tasks.