Energy Consumption of Multi-Radio Access Technology Internet of Things Gateway for UAV-Based Communication Infrastructure

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are essential enablers for future sustainable industrial and smart city applications. This makes UAV's autonomy based on energy-efficient operation a crucial research and engineering challenge. To address this challenge, in this paper, we advocate and experimentally study the design and energy performance of a multi-radio access technology (multi-RAT) connectivity system for UAVs. Specifically, we discuss the architecture alternatives and tradeoffs of multi-RAT gateway first. Next, we design and instrument a prototype of a multi-RAT communication gateway by integrating three selected illustrative RATs, namely (i) Fifth Generation (5G) cellular (enabling UAV to operate as 5G User Equipment (UE)), (ii) Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) (gateway to receive data from other Internet of Things (IoT) devices) and, optionally, as the end node, (iii) Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Finally, we experimentally measure the energy consumption for each RAT transceiver separately and of all transceivers altogether. The presented results provide important insight into the design of multi-RAT communication systems for UAVs, their practical usage and the potential for further optimization.