BLE for the Cooperative Awareness of Miniature UAVs: An Experimental Analysis of the Different Advertising Modes
摘要
Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Cooperative Awareness (CA) is an Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) technology standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). It is designed to ensure future transportation systems are safe, reliable, and efficient. Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been increasingly utilized by various applications due to their expanding functionality. Consequently, a UAV-to-UAV CA solution is anticipated to become necessary in the near future. However, the implementation of a UAV-CA using Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technologies such as IEEE802.11p, IEEE802.11bd, and C-V2X is impossible on miniature UAVs due to overly high power consumption, the size and weight of commercial On-Board-Units (OBUs). This paper advocates using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as a carrier for Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM), benefiting from the low cost and low power consumption characteristics of this technology. Specifically, the paper reports the proof-of-concept implementations of CAM tailor-made for UAVs on top of BLE4 and BLE5 stacks and demonstrates the range and power consumption performance obtained using analytical and experimental approaches. The results indicate that BLE is able to provide multiple low-power solutions with adequate range capabilities while meeting traffic requirements of CAM.