UAV Network Design And Physical Implementation Based On Software-defined Radio Testbed

The continuous development of aviation technology and electronic information science and technology makes unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV),which have the advantages of low cost, strong mobility and flexibility, the best choice to substitute manned aircraft and satellites to scout and patrol. With the further development of UAV, they have become more and more widely used in human lives and production, such as agriculture detection, information collection of disaster and war. A single UAV can only bring limited amount of devices, resulting in a limited executive capability, and complex missions require more than one to observe and detect target area from several angles. Therefore, it has become a developing trend to construct a flying formation to establish formation networking,and to coordinate different aircraft to accomplish missions better.An effective platform is essential for network performance test in the research of UAV networking. The networking research and development on the ground cannot be verified or tested directly because it is of great difficulty and cost to install hardware directly in UAV for testing, however, simulating software cannot simulate radio transmission environment accurately. Therefore, it requires a testing platform which is easy to expand and develop, and can describe radio transmission environment more accurately.Based on the characteristics of UAV formation and referring to the existing communication techniques and protocols, this paper design the protocol construction of UAV formation networking, and accomplish the physical implementation of UAV networking based on software-defined radio platform. Firstly, this paper introduces the basic concept and research status of UAV, and analyzes the technologies related to UAV networking. Secondly, it introduces the basic theory and characteristics of software-defined radio, and talks about the construction and working mechanism of GNU Radio and USRP briefly. Thirdly, it designs the protocol construction, simulation, and configuration of UAV formation networking hierarchically on the platform, and establishes the networking node model. It provides the UAV formation networking with a testing platform in terms of the design of physical transceiver structure and the implementation of wireless transmission technology. It will be demonstrated in the paper that this platform can realize the basic bottom function of UAV networking protocol construction.