GAMODRONE · Game of Drones: Multimedia Streaming with Flying Terminals in Next Generation Mobile Networks
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-07-01 → 2019-06-30
- EU contribution
- €175,420
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Game of Drones: Multimedia Streaming with Flying Terminals in Next Generation Mobile Networks
Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in the volume of Internet data flow as well as in the number of devices connected to the Internet. Apart from traditional handheld mobile terminals, the use of civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that allow capturing and streaming video in real-time is steadily increasing. The technology for civil drones is maturing and there is potential for significant growth and job creation. On some estimates in the next 10 years it could be worth around 10% of the whole aviation market. Such rapidly growing market is going to pose important challenges on the future 5G/6G terrestrial networks. Although for the time being civilian UAV platforms are mainly meant to stream first person view (FPV) videos directly to the user terminal on unlicensed frequency bands, streaming directly on the Internet or private networks is going to become a concrete possibility soon. If on the one hand drones constitute a challengefrom a communication perspective, on the other hand they can be a potential asset for next generation mobile networks, by helping to provide missing coverage or “on demand” additional capacity. The goal of the present project was two-fold. The first goal was to develop new approaches to jointly optimize video and image production and transmission from civil UAV’s over wireless networks with focus of UAV-specific requirements such as low delay requirements and high mobility. The second goal was to exploit the unique 3D mobility capability of drones to assist mobile networks by providing additional capacity and missing coverage. Both goals of the project have been achieved by delivering original results, ranging from fundamental theoretical limits to video compression and streaming to practical low-complexity algorithms and development of proof-of-concept prototypes. Several top-ranked publications have been published and others are being finalized for submission.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The use of civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that allow capturing and streaming video in real-time is steadily increasing. One of the reasons for such interest is that the use of drones, either single units or in swarms, is currently being considered for reconnaissance missions in emergency situations such as earthquakes, radiation leakage in nuclear power plants or in case of a terrorist attack. More challenging applications such as package delivery services are also being considered, in which data speed, reliability and video quality are of paramount importance. Another promising application for civil UAV’s is to help providing flexibility to beyond-5G networks. The main goal of the project (highest priority) is to study efficient adaptive video compression and streaming solutions for interactive and non-interactive omnidirectional video that allow making an efficient use of the available bandwidth while satisfying target delay and video quality requirements. In order to deal with the limited knowledge of the interference environment at the receiver side (which is a likely scenario for airborne terminals) I will study efficient interference management and multi-user detection techniques. In order to further optimize the bandwidth usage, the correlation between the information of different terminals (e.g., when two or more drones within a swarm are capturing partly overlapping panoramas) will be exploited, so that redundant information is kept at the minimum necessary. The secondary goal (lower priority) of the project is the study of how to efficiently exploit the unique UAV’s mobility characteristics to provide additional coverage in congested network areas. This will be carried out by capitalizing on the results of the main goal. In particular, the channel characterization and the interference management techniques studied in the context of video streaming will be adapted to the use of drones as 3D-mobile gap-fillers.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE · LausanneCoordinatorSwitzerland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union