Citation

Labib NS, Danoy G, Musial J, Brust MR, Bouvry P. Sensors (Basel) 2019; 19(21): s19214779.

Affiliation

FSTC-CSC ILIAS, University of Luxembourg, L-4364 Esch-Sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. pascal.bouvry@uni.lu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s19214779

PMID

31684133

Abstract

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.

Language: en

Keywords

Internet of Things; autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles; low-altitude airspace; multilayer networks; traffic management