Avaliação de desempenho de tecnologias de comunicação sem fio paraaplicação em FANETs: uma abordagem prática em rádios LoRa e ZigBee

Abstract

In this dissertation, a comparative analysis of the long range and low consumption LoRatechnology via the LoRa RD42C radio and ZigBee technology via the XBee-PRO S3Bradio is performed. Both employing dynamic reactive routing protocols, with power andtransmission rate comparable to that of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The use ofUAVs in various fields is currently increasing exponentially, but the capacity of a singlelarge aircraft is limited in some environments. A smaller UAV faces challenges in terms offlight autonomy, payload capacity, and communication range. Based on this premise, theuse of flying ad hoc networks (FANET), tends to improve mission performance by enablinggreater communication range. In this context, it was noted that many studies analyze theperformance of radios in specific applications, mostly using point-to-point topology, inonly one communication technology, and only a portion of these studies perform practicalcomparison studies between radios. No experimental performance analysis between ZigBeeand LoRa radios for the requirements of a FANET was found in the literature studies. Anexperimental review was proposed for the performance analysis of the investigated radiotechnologies, which is divided into two groups: bench tests (or HIL, hardware-in-the-loop) where the consumption of the radios in different operating scenarios was analyzed,followed by tests of the transmission and delivery rates when sending packets; Ground-based experiments (or HITL, human-in-the-loop ) with synchronous and asynchronoustests of the transmission and delivery rates in a P2P network in discrete simulations ofmovement in an open urban area. Then, the transmission and delivery rates and the timerequired for asynchronous transmission were compared with P2P versus ad hoc networkswith multi-hops, also with discrete simulations of movement. As a contribution of thiswork, through the analysis of the experimental results obtained, comparisons of differentscenarios for the use of XBee and LoRa technologies in FANETs have been elaboratedwith the aim of deploying the appropriate communication technology for the purpose ofdifferent missions of an aerial mobile sensor network.