A Standard-Compliant and Information-Centric Communication Platform for the Internet of Drones

Abstract:
The Internet of Drones represents an emerging network architecture for coordinated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, adopted for the provisioning of advanced services in Intelligent Transportation Systems, traffic monitoring, photometry, smart agriculture, and disaster recovery application domains. During the flight, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles may frequently exchange heterogeneous information with the surrounding environment. But, given the number of issues arising from the expected mobile scenario, Internet of Drones requires a suitable communication platform that goes beyond the conventional host-centric approach characterizing the current Internet. To solve this problem, the scientific literature recently investigated the possibility to apply the Information-Centric Networking paradigm to the Internet of Drones. In this embryonic stage of the research, the contribution presented herein promotes the adoption of the ICN-IoT framework, recently conceived within the Information-Centric Networking Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force, as a flexible and effective communication bus for the Internet of Drones. In addition, it extends that framework with new features, including publish-subscribe functionalities suitable for mobile scenarios, flexible retrieving of geo-referenced contents, data dissemination after service discontinuity, and dynamic caching strategy for realm-time information. To practically show the potentials of the proposed approach, the main facets of the extended ICN-IoT framework have been discussed through a reference use case.