Improving Drone Communication QoS Through Adaptive Redundancy

Drone operations are gaining high interest in many sectors. Continuous and reliable communication between drones and their Ground Control Station (GSC) is crucial for successful and safe drone operations. However, due to the wireless nature of this communication, the Quality of Service (QoS) is often unreliable. Obstacles or cyberattacks (e.g., jamming) can impair communication, endangering drones, operators, and even public safety. In this paper, we therefore analyze drone communication QoS and propose a formal QoS definition to estimate QoS for a given situation and communication interface. We further present an Adaptive Drone Communication Redundancy (ADCR) mechanism to improve drone communication QoS efficiently. Using the estimated and monitored QoS, ADCR dynamically increases the number of used heterogeneous interfaces to communicate redundantly when the QoS is below a certain threshold. To conserve resources, when the QoS threshold is met, the redundancy is reduced again. We evaluate our work using a physical drone testbed which demonstrates that ADCR improves reliability even in the presence of jamming attacks, while creating a 50% lower overhead than fully redundant communication, thus balancing the trade-off between efficiency and redundancy.