Field Trial of Drones with an Aerial Wireless Mesh Network Control System

Software defined networking (SDN) is applied for efficient traffic control in aerial wireless mesh networks. In this scenario, each mesh node requires a connection path to the involved SDN controller. To deal with the loss of connection paths due to wireless link failure, we propose and implement the combination of an ad hoc routing protocol with an SDN protocol. Maintaining a connection path to the SDN controller enables the implementation of the consecutive efficient traffic control. Additionally, we propose two routing algorithm control methods that are suitable for aerial wireless mesh networks, and we implement them in an SDN controller. One is a metric algorithm, and the other is a combined optimization algorithm that is intended to minimize the maximum link bandwidth utilization. The combination optimization algorithm prevents communication flows from concentrating on specific links, thereby improving the system throughput of the mesh network. We implemented the proposed system in actual drone equipment and conducted field trial evaluations, demonstrating multihop communication in the air, automatic route switching using the metric algorithm, and route distribution using the combination optimization algorithm, which all could work satisfactorily in a real field.