Resilient Hybrid SatCom and Terrestrial Networking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Today, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in many different scenarios including search, monitoring, inspection, and surveillance. To be able to transmit the sensor data from the UAVs to the destination reliably within tangible response times to the relevant content is crucial, especially for tactical use cases. In this paper, we propose network coded torrents (NECTOR) to leverage multiple network interfaces for resilient hybrid satellite communications (SatCom) and terrestrial networking for UAVs. NECTOR is significantly different from the state-of-the-art multipath protocols such as multipath TCP (MPTCP) as it does not require any additional packet scheduler, rate-adaptation or forward error correction. We present the design and implementation of NECTOR, and evaluate its performance compared to MPTCP. Our experimental results show that NECTOR provides goodput (up to 70%) higher than MPTCP with 5.49 times less signaling overhead.