Intelligent, Efficient and Secure Operation of UAV Swarm through Adaptive Heterogeneous Communication and Edge-Cloud Collaboration

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The recent technological advancement and rapidly growing market have led to the dramatic proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). By exploiting the collaboration among multiple UAVs, UAV swarm technology is becoming a viable solution to overcome the limitation of a single UAV. The main objective of this NSERC CRD project is to develop the integrated design of all heterogeneous wireless communication links and the corresponding collaboration mechanisms, as well as edge-cloud data processing techniques for highly robust, efficient and intelligent UAV swarm operation. Specifically, the proposed research is focused on robust and low latency concurrent command and control, effective operation of multi-UAV-based flying ad hoc networks (FANET), which are achieved through the proposed coordination mechanism among Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) to support dynamic operation of an UAV swarm and efficient dense communications. In achieving low latency communications in ultra-dense FANET networks, new concepts of virtual small cell and prioritized access will be utilized. In addition, a situation-aware data collection through intelligent edge-cloud collaboration will be developed in achieving intelligent UAV swarm operation.The funds from the NSERC CRD program will be mainly used to support the research and development team at Western University, which includes five Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP) trainee positions on an annual basis, as well as the interaction activities with General Dynamics Land System ("GDLS"). Both theoretical aspects of the proposed adaptive concurrent low latency C2 transmission techniques, and the practical aspects on HetNets coordination and intelligent operation of FANET will be investigated by the NSERC CRD trainees. In addition, intelligent situation-aware task scheduling using machine learning will be investigated by the researchers from Western University and GDLS. This project will help the Canadian industries develop robust, efficient, and large scale machine communications and UAV swarm operation technologies based on the research results, which will directly benefit the ICT based Canadian economy.