Streaming from the Air: Enabling Drone-sourced Video Streaming Applications on 5G Open-RAN Architectures

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel control system for drone-based video streaming in 5G Open-RAN networks, optimizing drone positioning and transmission to enhance network capacity and support high-data-rate uplink communication.

Contribution

It introduces a low-complexity, closed-loop control system for Open-RAN that jointly optimizes drone location and transmission directionality, validated through real-world experiments and large-scale simulations.

Findings

Achieves 19% average network capacity gain over traditional methods.

Supports high-data-rate uplink for drone video streaming.

Validated through outdoor testbed and large-scale simulations.

Abstract

Enabling high data-rate uplink cellular connectivity for drones is a challenging problem, since a flying drone has a higher likelihood of having line-of-sight propagation to base stations that terrestrial UEs normally do not have line-of-sight to. This may result in uplink inter-cell interference and uplink performance degradation for the neighboring ground UEs when drones transmit at high data-rates (e.g., video streaming). We address this problem from a cellular operator's standpoint to support drone-sourced video streaming of a point of interest. We propose a low-complexity, closed-loop control system for Open-RAN architectures that jointly optimizes the drone's location in space and its transmission directionality to support video streaming and minimize its uplink interference impact on the network. We prototype and experimentally evaluate the proposed control system on a dedicated outdoor multi-cell RAN testbed, which is the first measurement campaign of its kind. Furthermore, we perform a large-scale simulation assessment of the proposed control system using the actual cell deployment topologies and cell load profiles of a major US cellular carrier. The proposed Open-RAN control scheme achieves an average 19% network capacity gain over traditional BS-constrained control solutions and satisfies the application data-rate requirements of the drone (e.g., to stream an HD video).