The Possibility of Improving the Range and Quality of Air-to-Ground WebRTC-Based IoT Communication in Emergency Situations by Employing an External Transceiver

The proliferation of new services, either interpersonal or machine-oriented, has generated new demands concerning the flexibility and efficiency of transmission. The ubiquity of multimedia communication in the current internet is seamlessly and successfully supported by the WebRTC concept. This paper reports on the study of the usage of a solution employing a proxy transmission unit for air-to-ground delivery of video streaming multiplexed with sensor data in the UAV-IoT system when using the WebRTC protocol stack. The comparative experiments were carried out for two cases employing the 802.11ac network with WebRTC: the first scenario (S1) without an external transceiver and the second scenario (S2) with an external transceiver working as a proxy of the ground receiver. The presented results compare the transmission conditions without (scenario S1) and with (scenario S2) the external transceiver in terms of the RSSI, the available data rate, and total throughput of transmission of multimedia data (video stream from the UAV camera and bursty data coming from employed sensors. The usefulness of the external transceiver used in a wide range of transmission conditions is clearly proven.