Description
The objective of this activity is the design and demonstration of network protocols that can use multiple unreliable satellite and terrestrial networks for increased resilience and security for retrieval of multimedia data with multiple QoS classes from drones and unmanned maritime vessels. Targeted Improvements: This technique will allow at least 50% increase in the number of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) that can be supported in the same satellite network. Description:Sending high-quality secure video streams, clips and photos from unmanned mobile platforms, at sea or in the air, beyond the range of local radio links, require use of communicationnetworks that cover air and sea, in addition to land. In addition, there may be additional data sources on board these platforms such as AIS (Automatic Identification System) receiver, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), and maritime radar. Providing high-availability, high-capacity networks in such remote regions is costly. Thus, there is a marketneed for protocols that can jointly use multiple low-availability, low-cost networks for increased resilience. Security is also important and splitting the information across multiple networks may increase security resilience to interception, and resilience to jamming. Satellite communication complements terrestrial networks, such as 3G, 4G and 5G. However, in a mobile context, coverage changes, and choosing how to use, select and combine, multiple heterogenous networks can quickly become a complex challenge. In a dynamic and changing mobile situations, like drones flying beyond line of sight, predicting capacity of individual network branches based on history does not guarantee stability in the future. There are already multipath transport protocols, access traffic switching/steering/splitting protocols, andprotocols integrating network coding with Torrent protocol that can jointly use multiple networks. The proposed activity shall design and demonstrate such protocols for secure and resilient multimedia communications from unmanned mobile platforms with multiple data sources with varying levels of QoS in latency, availability, security, etc. The key engineering challenges are design of algorithms that dynamically select networks, schedule packets, optimise protocol configurations as a function of current network conditions and required latency/availability/security QoS levels for each application. Such algorithms shall be implemented to achieve high throughput in real time with possibly constrained computational resources on board the aforementioned mobile platforms. The work shall demonstrate solutions for video streaming via at least one satellite link and two separate cellular networks simultaneously using a mobile platform, and demonstrate that stable, adaptive HD and possibly 4K video streaming in near real-time is possible using the selected technology. It shall demonstrate that when capacity is sufficiently high, both live video and transmission of other sources of data such as earlier requested video clips, high-definition photo content, maritime radar data etc. is possible. It shall demonstrate resilience to cellular networks that have low availability.Footnote: On Delegation Request activities will only be initiated onthe explicit request of at least one National Delegation. Procurement Policy: C(1) = Activity restricted to non-prime contractors (incl. SMEs). For additional information please go to: http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Business_with_ESA/Small_and_Medium_Sized_En…