Performance improvement of transmission in Unmanned Aerial Systems using multipath TCP

One Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is not efficient for carrying out search-and-rescue, reconnaissance, and surveillance because it has to make multiple back-and-forth trips across an area. The solution is to use a swarm of cooperating UAVs to form an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS). Using UASs poses the well-known problems exhibited by Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETS) of frequent disconnections and high rates of failed transmissions as vehicles move in and out of network coverage areas. Seamless handover can be achieved by using multiple and diverse transmission paths per UAV. The first contribution of this paper is a novel mathematical relationship model that assigns fitness scores for purposes of matching a UAV interface type to transmission type. Transmission type examples are telemetry, video, and still images. The second contribution is the first ever wireless Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) module in Network Simulator 2 (NS2). The third contribution is a simulation implementation of our mathematical model in the new MPTCP over wireless protocol. In simulation, this approach improves transmission throughput by 20% over the recommended standard MPTCP. Our implementation design for a real UAS that uses multi-interface networks is reported.