UAV Trajectory Planning for Adaptive Bitrate Applications using an Inextensibility Metric

UAVs are increasingly used in various applications, and some can adapt to varying radio conditions. In the future, UAVs from different vendors will share the air space deployed for different operations, and hence, maintaining minimum connectivity will become crucial for traffic management and beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) safe operations. As the aerial coverage is fragmented, trajectory planning for UAVs while maintaining basic connectivity becomes challenging. In this work, we propose a trajectory planning algorithm that uses the weighted sum method to measure and compare the paths based on the distance, coverage conditions, and adaptable network requirements. We further analyze the impact of movements a UAV can make in 3D grid for pathfinding. A UAV can move in different directions at variable distances. Our results show that a higher degree of movement allows the algorithm to find shorter paths than the lower degree of movement. However, the runtime depends upon the coverage conditions.