Internet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-A Multilayer Low-Altitude Airspace Model for Distributed UAV Traffic Management

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 19; no. 21; p. 4779
• Main Authors: Labib, Nader S, Danoy, Grégoire, Musial, Jedrzej, Brust, Matthias R, Bouvry, Pascal
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 03-11-2019; MDPI
• Subjects: Altitude; autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles; Aviation; Collaboration; Communication; Data exchange; Energy consumption; Infrastructure; Internet of Things; Localization; Low altitude; low-altitude airspace; multilayer networks; Multilayers; Traffic management; Traffic models; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Vehicles; Wireless networks; Working groups; autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles; multilayer networks; traffic management; Internet of Things; low-altitude airspace
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s19214779

The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) has encouraged the integration of new connected devices such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to the ubiquitous network. UAVs promise a pragmatic solution to the limitations of existing terrestrial IoT infrastructure as well as bring new means of delivering IoT services through a wide range of applications. Owning to their potential, UAVs are expected to soon dominate the low-altitude airspace over populated cities. This introduces new research challenges such as the safe management of UAVs operation under high traffic demands. This paper proposes a novel way of structuring the uncontrolled, low-altitude airspace, with the aim of addressing the complex problem of UAV traffic management at an abstract level. The work, hence, introduces a model of the airspace as a weighted multilayer network of nodes and airways and presents a set of experimental simulation results using three UAV traffic management heuristics.