UAVs Traffic Control based on Multi-Access Edge Computing

Abstract

Given the continuously increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in different domains, their management in the uncontrolled airspace has become a necessity. This has given rise to new systems called UAVs Traffic Management (UTM) systems. Nevertheless, currently, there is a lack of communication infrastructures that can support the requirements of UTM systems. Luckily, the envisioned 5G mobile network has introduced the concept of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) in its architecture to support mission-critical applications by decreasing the end-to-end latency and the unreliability of communication. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the network latency and reliability on the control of UAVs' flights. The obtained results show that a UAV can deviate from its intended path with more than $5m$ if the network latency exceeds 400ms and with more than $2m$ if the packet loss probability exceeds 0.2. To overcome these limitations, we have leveraged MEC to provide a new UTM framework that enables an efficient traffic management. Moreover, due to MEC resource-limited nature and in order to give an insight about the resource provisioning, we have evaluated the scalability of the proposed solution in terms of the number of UAVs that can be handled without affecting the efficiency of the proposed UTM framework.