Experimental UAV Data Traffic Modeling and Network Performance Analysis

Network support for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is raising an interest among researchers due to the strong potential applications. However, current knowledge on UAV data traffic is mainly based on conceptual studies and does not provide an in-depth insight on the data traffic properties. To close this gap, we present a measurement-based study analyzing in detail the Control and Non-payload Communication (CNPC) traffic produced by three different UAVs when communicating with their remote controller over 802.11 protocol. We analyze the traffic in terms of data rate, inter-packet interval and packet length distributions, and identify their main influencing factors. The data traffic appears neither deterministic nor periodic but bursty, with a tendency towards Poisson traffic. We further create an understanding on how the traffic of the investigated UAVs are internally generated and propose a model to analytically capture their traffic processes, which provides an explanation for the observed behavior. We implemented a publicly available UAV traffic generator "AVIATOR" based on the proposed traffic model and verified the model by comparing the simulated traces with the experimental results.