Exploiting VPN Bonding for Time Critical Video Transmission on Board Drone

The use of drones or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) for civilian applications and the related new paradigm of drone communications are arousing great interest in the subject over the last years. The application contexts are various and most of them need to transmit time critical data between the drone and the Internet and, particularly, towards a command and control station. In such a case it is essential to equip the drone with a communication system capable of solving typical concerns such as connection reliability, coverage area, bandwidth limitations, high packet loss rate and similar. This research presents a prototype of a mobile gateway exploiting the VPN (Virtual Private Network) bonding technique and the use of two 4G modems to improve the transmission of real time video to the remote control station. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique a preliminary test has been carried out equipping the drone with a mobile gateway during a flight campaign in rural areas: VMF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion) tool and the related index has been employed to evaluate the improvement in terms of video quality perceived by the operator.