SI-Drones 2020 : Sensors MDPI | SI on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Sensor Networks

In the last years, drone-embarked real-time sensing applications have bloomed, ranging from aerial surveillance to remote infrastructure state monitoring, terrain surveying, etc. Those applications demand robust and high bandwidth communication coverage, even at remote areas, also imposing high computation demands, quite often in a distributed environment involving cloud and edged computing. Also, drone command and control, especially for Beyond Line of Sight (BVLOS) applications, demands low-latency robust communication of telemetry, command orders and quite often video for the remote pilot. Also, drones are gaining autonomy, and capabilities to coordinate their operations, either to avoid conflicts or to perform missions cooperatively (i.e. drone swarms). Finally, new safety requirements are being imposed to drones operations, to be able to use them in higher-population areas. One of the most relevant is the need to integrate themselves with UAV Traffic Management (UTM) systems, formed of a collection of distributed pre-flight and along-flight traffic coordination services demanding a bidirectional datalink to the drones and/or the pilots. 

Summarizing, drones can be seen as Aerial (mobile) IoT sensing platforms with different communication/coordination needs both for operating safely and for performing their very diverse intended missions.