Toward the Integration of UAVs' Services into the Cloud

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) into the cloud environment aims to put their on board equipment and capabilities at the service of end users at an affordable cost. Coupling both technologies will help leveraging them as a strong and novel service provider. This integration incolves service infrastructures, services offer and request protocols, and services selection techniques. In this article, we propose a new UAV-cloud architecture that enables UAVs to offer services allowing static as well as mobile users to request real-time and delay-tolerant UAV services using different communication technologies. This architecture comprises three layers. The middleware layer receives and processes requests from the end-user layer, then orchestrates activities where it plans missions and chooses from the infrastructure layer and the edge the appropriate UAV to satisfy consumer requests. The interaction between the different layers is made possible using two new protocols proposed to deal with the service request and consumption scenarios. Moreover, UAVs are highly extensible, and can advertise offers and receive requests in a centralized or distributed way by integrating a new module to their systems.