Ground Control System Based Routing for Reliable and Efficient Multi-Drone Control System

Various unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also called drones, have developed based on advances in hardware and software technologies. Thus, service providers in diverse areas have tried to utilize drones to create more effective solutions. In many cases, employing multiple drones is more effective to perform the given mission than using a single drone. To utilize multiple drones, the drones should be strongly connected, but it is not trivial to construct reliable and efficient networks for drones due to their high mobility. Therefore, we propose a ground control system (GCS) routing protocol (GCS-routing) to overcome this limitation and provide reliable and efficient multi-drone control system, where GCS-routing maximizes GCS utilization. GCS is the essential component of flying ad-hoc network (FANET) and can obtain information about drones. Using this information, GCS-routing can provide more effective routing, predict any topology changes, and react immediately. GCS-routing does not issue any periodic HELLO message for neighbor discovery or link cost estimation, which significantly enhances network performance. We implemented GCS-routing on real drones, and applied GCS-routing to actual drone fleets, as well as simulations to evaluate GCS-routing performance. The results clearly identify the advantages of the proposed routing protocol for drone networks compared with current routing protocols.