Find in Library

In the last ten years, supported by the advances in technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), UAVs have developed rapidly and are utilized for a wide range of applications. To operate UAVs safely, by exchanging control packets continuously, operators should be able to monitor UAVs in real-time and deal with any problems immediately. However, due to any networking problems or unstable wireless communications, control packets can be lost or transmissions can be delayed, which causes the unstable drone control. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose <i>MuTran</i> for enabling reliable UAV control. <i>MuTran</i> considers the packet type and duplicates only control packets, not data packets. After that, <i>MuTran</i> transmits the original and duplicate packets through multiple protocols and paths to improve the reliability of control packet transmissions. We designed <i>MuTran</i> and conducted a lot of theoretical analyses to demonstrate the validity of <i>MuTran</i> and analyze it from various aspects. We implemented <i>MuTran</i> on real devices and evaluated <i>MuTran</i> using the devices. We conducted experiments to verify the limitations of the existing systems and demonstrate that control packets can be transmitted more stably by using <i>MuTran</i>. Through the analysis and experimental results, we confirmed that <i>MuTran</i> reduces the control packet transfer delay, which improves the reliability and stability of controlling UAVs.