An Efficient and Secure Communication Link for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

With the rapidly advancing technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), widely known as drones, are becoming increasingly effective and significantly less costly during the most recent years. These vehicles can be controlled either under remote control (RC) by a pilot operator or autonomously by onboard computers. Since the communication link of a UAV and its reliability evaluation represent an arduous field, we have concentrated our work on this topic. The demand on the validity and reliability of the communication and data link of a UAV is much higher since the environment of modern battlefield is becoming more and more complex. Therefore, the communication channel between the vehicle and ground control station (GCS) should be secure and provide an efficient data link. This thesis analyzes the network latency and data loss of the MAVLink communication protocol. In this thesis, APM 2.8 board was used instead of drone in order to analyze the data link between the GCS and autopilot using Mission Planner and Wireshark softwares. The thesis proposes a method of securing the MAVLink protocol using AES-128 encryption algorithm. Furthermore, similar to other types of communications, data link of a UAV has several requirements such as long range operation, high efficiency, reliable communication and low latency. In order to achieve an efficient data link, we need to adopt a highly efficient modulation technique, which leads to an increase in flight time of the UAV, data transmission rate and reliability of communication link. For this purpose, we have investigated the single carrier frequency division multiplexing (SC-FDM) modulation technique for a UAV communication system. The results obtained from the comparative study demonstrate that SC-FDM has better performance than currently used modulation technique for a UAV communication link.