Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems are being increasingly used in a broad range of applications requiring extensive communications, either to interconnect the UAVs with each other or with ground resources. Focusing either on the modeling of UAV operations or communication and network dynamics, available simulation tools fail to capture the complex interdependencies between these two aspects of the problem. The main contribution of this paper is a flexible and scalable open source simulator -- FlyNetSim -- bridging the two domains. The overall objective is to enable simulation and evaluation of UAV swarms operating within articulated multi-layered technological ecosystems, such as the Urban Internet of Things (IoT). To this aim, FlyNetSim interfaces two open source tools, ArduPilot and ns-3, creating individual data paths between the devices operating in the system using a publish and subscribe-based middleware. The capabilities of FlyNetSim are illustrated through several case-study scenarios including UAVs interconnecting with a multi-technology communication infrastructure and intra-swarm ad-hoc communications.
@article{arxiv.1808.04967,
title = {FlyNetSim: An Open Source Synchronized UAV Network Simulator based on ns-3 and Ardupilot},
author = {Sabur Baidya and Zoheb Shaikh and Marco Levorato},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.04967},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
This article has been accepted for publication in the ACM MSWiM 2018. 21st ACM International Conference on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWIM '18), October 28-November 2, 2018, Montreal, QC, Canada