Real-Time Multipath Multimedia Traffic in Cellular Networks for Command and Control Applications

This work describes a real testbed for enabling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)-to-ground real-time video streaming. The aim is in providing a video feed to the pilot on the ground for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLoS) operations exploiting cellular networks in urban/suburban areas. Towards this aim, multipath communications are used in a multi-operator setup to counteract the intermittent network coverage in urban and suburban areas. The main requirements are low latency and a continuous video stream of reasonable quality. We rely on both upper-layer Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques and link diversity, so to increase the probability of fluid video playback with acceptable quality. We report per-link statistics, collected during field trials, of three different cellular operators, to analyse the impact of using a set of physical links as a single logical one on an RTP-based video streaming. In our tests, such a setup has provided a good level of performance.