An Experimental Research Platform Architecture for UAS Communications and Networking

Abstract

New use cases for advanced wireless technologies are emerging in the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) spaces. These put pressure on technology and regulation. The way to overcome this is to gain experience and collect data while operating UAS in production environments. To this end, we introduce AERPAW: Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless, and present an architecture for designing a large-scale community testbed in a production-like environment to enable controllable experiments with latest wireless technologies and systems. Using advanced networking and virtualization technology to manage the platform resources, users will be able to configure the testbed for running a variety of at-scale experiments for UAS localization and tracking, networking, trajectory optimization, spectrum management, and aerial-terrestrial cellular network design and optimization based on 5G and software radio technology, among others.