UAV Support for Mission Critical Services

Abstract

Mission critical solutions are essential for providing communications and services in the case of the troubles with connectivity that are often found in infrastructure-based solutions. Such solutions are typically used in the case of disasters, lack of energy, etc. There exist several narrowband solutions that provide countrywide coverage in certain countries. In recent years, the activities related to creating mission-critical broadband solutions based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) have led to the definition of LTE Mission Critical (LTE-MC). Both solutions ignore virtualization and require dedicated mobile terminals as a part of the mission-critical communication solution. This paper describes the opportunities, open issues and a proposal of a solution that exploits Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and network virtualization for mission-critical services. The presented approach combines Cloud/Edge and Fog orchestration to efficiently use all the available resources, including virtualized resources of the end-user devices.

Keywords

• mission-critical
• UAV
• LTE-MC
• TETRA
• MEC
• network virtualization