The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains, including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in the UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate more than $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this paper, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss the current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security-related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have attracted a lot of attention, since they represent a new potential market. Along with the maturity of the technology and relevant regulations, a worldwide deployment of these UAVs is expected. Thanks to the high mobility of drones, they can be used to provide a lot of applications, such as service delivery, pollution mitigation, farming, and in the rescue operations. Due to its ubiquitous usability, the UAV will play an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, and it may become the main key enabler of this vision. While these UAVs would be deployed for specific objectives (e.g., service delivery), they can be, at the same time, used to offer new IoT value-added services when they are equipped with suitable and remotely controllable machine type communications (MTCs) devices (i.e., sensors, cameras, and actuators). However, deploying UAVs for the envisioned purposes cannot be done before overcoming the relevant challenging issues. These challenges comprise not only technical issues, such as physical collision, but also regulation issues as this nascent technology could be associated with problems like breaking the privacy of people or even use it for illegal operations like drug smuggling. Providing the communication to UAVs is another challenging issue facing the deployment of this technology. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the UAVs and the related issues will be introduced. In addition, our envisioned UAV-based architecture for the delivery of UAV-based value-added IoT services from the sky will be introduced, and the relevant key challenges and requirements will be presented.

Low-Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Based Internet of Things Services: Comprehensive Survey and Future Perspectives

The imminent arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), which consists of a vast number of devices with heterogeneous characteristics, means that future networks need a new architecture to accommodate the expected increase in data generation. Software defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization (NV) are two technologies that promise to cost-effectively provide the scale and versatility necessary for IoT services. In this paper, we survey the state of the art on the application of SDN and NV to IoT. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a comprehensive description of every possible IoT implementation aspect for the two technologies. We start by outlining the ways of combining SDN and NV. Subsequently, we present how the two technologies can be used in the mobile and cellular context, with emphasis on forthcoming 5G networks. Afterward, we move to the study of wireless sensor networks, arguably the current foremost example of an IoT network. Finally, we review some general SDN-NV-enabled IoT architectures, along with real-life deployments and use-cases. We conclude by giving directions for future research on this topic.

SDN and Virtualization Solutions for the Internet of Things: A Survey

Vehicular communication networks is a powerful tool that enables numerous vehicular data services and applications. The rapid growth in vehicles has also resulted in the vehicular network becoming heterogeneous, dynamic, and large-scale, making it hard to meet the strict requirements, such as extremely latency, high mobility, top security, and enormous connections of the fifth-generation network. Previous studies have shown that with the increase in the application of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) on Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) in industries, researchers have exerted considerable efforts to improve vehicular communications. This study presents an exhaustive review of previous works by classifying them based on based on wireless communication, particularly VANET. First, a concise summary of the VANET structure and SDN controller with layers and details of their infrastructure is provided. Second, a description of SDN-VANET applications in different wireless communications, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and VANET is provided with concentration on the examination and comparison of SDN-VANET works on several parameters. This paper also provides a detailed analysis of the open issues and research directions accomplished while integrating the VANET with SDN. It also highlights the current and emerging technologies with use cases in vehicular networks to address the several challenges in the VANET infrastructure. This survey acts as a catalyst in raising the emergent robustness routing protocol, latency, connectivity and security issues of future SDN-VANET architectures.

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A Comprehensive Survey: Benefits, Services, Recent Works, Challenges, Security, and Use Cases for SDN-VANET

With the recent advances in the telecommunications and auto industries, we have witnessed growing interest in ITS, of which VANETs are an essential component. SDN can bring advantages to ITS through its ability to provide flexibility and programmability to networks through a logically centralized controller entity that has a comprehensive view of the network. However, as the SDN paradigm initially had fixed networks in mind, adapting it to work on VANETs requires some changes to address particular characteristics of this kind of scenario, such as the high mobility of its nodes. There has been initial work on bringing SDN concepts to vehicular networks to expand its abilities to provide applications and services through the increased flexibility, but most of these studies do not directly tackle the issue of loss of connectivity with said controller entity. In this article, we propose a hierarchical SDN-based vehicular architecture that aims to have improved performance in the situation of loss of connection with the central SDN controller. Simulation results show that our proposal outperforms traditional routing protocols in the scenario where there is no coordination from the central SDN controller.

An Architecture for Hierarchical Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an intermittently connected mobile network in which message propagation is quite challenging. Conventional routing protocols proposed for VANET are usually in greedy or optimum fashion. Geographical forwarding only uses local information to make the routing decision which may lead to long packet delay, while link-based forwarding has better performance but requires much more overheads. To disseminate message efficiently in VANET, a routing protocol which has both short delivery delay time and low routing overhead is required. In this paper, we proposed a SDN-based routing framework for efficiently message propagation in VANET. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology that decouples the control plane from the data forwarding plane in switches and collects all the control planes into a central controller. In SDN-based routing framework, the central controller gathers network information from switches and computes optimal routing paths for switches based on the global network information. Since switches don’t need to exchange routing information with each other, the routing overhead is much lower. This paper is the first to propose a SDN-based routing framework for efficiently message propagation in VANET. A new algorithm is developed to find the global optimal route from the source to the destination in VANET with dynamic network density. We demonstrate, through the simulation results, that our proposed framework significantly outperforms the related protocols in terms of both delivery delay time and routing overhead.

SDN-Based Routing for Efficient Message Propagation in VANET

Currently, many automotive manufacturers including Mercedes Benz and BMW have released new products equipped with intelligent onboard systems (IOSs) that support interconnection between vehicles and the remote service center. With the help of IOSs, vehicles can obtain traffic information and enjoy location-based services, such as restaurant and nearby gas station recommendations. However, IOSs adopt a closed architecture and are very difficult to upgrade to support new services. NFV is introduced as a new methodology that offers a potential way out of this bottleneck. Utilizing virtualization technologies, NFV may execute services as software applications on standard IT platforms like servers, switches, and storage. Using NFV technology, closed IOSs can be transformed to open ones and upgraded with lower cost. In this article, we introduce an NFV-based framework for vehicular ad hoc networks, and discuss the benefits and challenges. We also present two use cases to demonstrate its strength.

Providing flexible services for heterogeneous vehicles: an NFV-based approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as promising relay platforms to improve the connectivity of ground Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Due to the relatively high cost of UAVs, a lot of efforts have been made to optimize the deployment of UAVs so that the number of UAVs needed in maintaining the connectivity of ground nodes can be minimized. However, existing work on optimization of UAVs' deployment hasn't considered the situation that there are already some UAVs deployed in the field. In this paper, we study the problem of deploying minimum number of UAVs to maintain the connectivity of ground MANETs under the condition that some UAVs have already been deployed in the field. We formulate this problem as a Minimum Steiner Tree problem with Existing Mobile Steiner points under Edge Length Bound constraints (MST-EMSELB) and prove that the problem is NP-Complete. We also propose an Existing UAVs Aware (EUA) polynomial time approximate algorithm for the MST-EMSELB problem that uses a maximum match heuristic to compute new positions for existing UAVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed EUA method has bester performance than a non-EUA method in the term of needed new UAV numbers. Compared with the non-EUA method, the EUA method can reduce at most 60% of the new UAVs number.

Using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles to maintain connectivity of MANETs

Multiple-copy routing is widely used in sparse vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Recently, we proposed a novel architecture named software-defined vehicular networks (SDVNs) that can provide a global view of the whole network and centralized control over vehicular switches. However, existing multiple-copy routing protocols cannot utilize the benefits of SDVNs to improve routing efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Spray-and-Prey multiple-copy routing protocol for SDVNs. The Spray-and-Prey protocol uses graph-based minimum communication hops to define the utility of carriers and utilize two copies cooperation schemes to reduce delivery delay. Further more, the proposed protocol can clear other copies in the network when one copy arrives at the destination with low cost. Simulation experiment demonstrates that spray-and-prey protocol has lower delivery delay and network resource cost than other protocol in sparse SDVNs scenarios.

Efficient multiple-copy routing in software-defined vehicular networks

The link capacity of ground mobile nodes varies dramatically and is often under the required quality level due to limited communication range and signal blocking of terrain. To improve the link capacity of ground mobile nodes, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as relay platforms. By establishing a communication relay chain between ground mobile nodes, UAVs can provide required communication quality for ground nodes. Since ground nodes are continuously moving, UAVs also need to control their motion to maintain the relay chain. However, existing work have not considered the mobility of ground nodes or not set the link capacity as optimization objects. In this paper, we study the optimization problem of motion control of UAVs to maximize the link capacity of two ground mobile nodes. We propose an artificial potential field (APF) based solution. In APF-based solution, communication object is formulated as attractive force and collision avoidance of UAVs are formulated as repulsive force. UAVs change their speed and heading angle under the joint force. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed APF-based solution has better performance than gradient estimate method under different scenarios. We also analyze the impact of motion constrains of UAVs and show that the performance of APF-based solution can be improve when loosing some of the motion constraints.

Ming Zhu

Papers

SDN-Based Routing for Efficient Message Propagation in VANET

Providing flexible services for heterogeneous vehicles: an NFV-based approach

Using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles to maintain connectivity of MANETs

Efficient multiple-copy routing in software-defined vehicular networks

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle chain to improve link capacity of two mobile nodes