Software-defined unmanned aerial vehicles networking for video dissemination services

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) empower people to reach endangered areas under emergency situations. By collaborating with each other, multiple UAVs forming a UAV network (UAVNet) could work together to perform specific tasks in a more efficient and intelligent way than having a single UAV. UAVNets pose special characteristics of high dynamics, unstable aerial wireless links, and UAV collision probabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a Software-Defined UAV Networking (SD-UAVNet) architecture, which facilitates the management of UAV networks through a centralized SDN UAV controller. In addition, we introduce a use case scenario to evaluate the optimal UAV relay node placement for life video surveillance services with the proposed architecture. In the SD-UAVNet architecture, the controller considers the global UAV relevant context information to optimize the UAVs' movements, selects proper routing paths, and prevents UAVs from collisions to determine the relay nodes deployment and guarantee satisfactory video quality. The experimental results show that the proposed SD-UAVNet architecture can effectively mitigate the challenges of UAVNet and it provides suitable Quality of Experience (QoE) to end-users. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.