Real-time Video Streaming and Control of Cellular-Connected UAV System: Prototype and Performance Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper presents a prototype and performance evaluation of a cellular-connected UAV system using LTE, analyzing its real-time video streaming and control capabilities under various conditions.

Contribution

It develops a testbed for LTE-based UAV communication and provides experimental insights into system performance related to transmission frequency and reliability.

Findings

Performance varies with flight height, video resolution, and transmission frequency.

Indoor tests reveal key factors affecting link outage and system adaptability.

The prototype demonstrates feasibility of LTE for real-time UAV control and streaming.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play an increasingly important role in military, public, and civilian applications, where providing connectivity to UAVs is crucial for its real-time control, video streaming, and data collection. Considering that cellular networks offer wide area, high speed, and secure wireless connectivity, cellular-connected UAVs have been considered as an appealing solution to provide UAV connectivity with enhanced reliability, coverage, throughput, and security. Due to the nature of UAVs mobility, the throughput, reliability and End-to-End (E2E) delay of UAVs communication under various flight heights, video resolutions, and transmission frequencies remain unknown. To evaluate these parameters, we develop a cellular-connected UAV testbed based on the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network with its uplink video transmission and downlink control\&command (CC) transmission. We also design algorithms for sending control signal and controlling UAV. The indoor experimental results provide fundamental insights for the cellular-connected UAV system design from the perspective of transmission frequency, adaptability, and link outage, respectively.