Up where quality meets sustainability: providing advanced multimedia services by green UAVs networks
The project addresses the issue of providing advanced multimedia services by green Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) networks.
Differently from the research lines described in the related works in the literature, in this project we address UAV networks trajectory planning strategies that are constrained by two key aspects: the energy consumed by the drone fleet on one side and the Quality of Experience characterizing the service offered to the users on the other side. As far as we know this is the first attempt to plan UAV paths jointly accounting for the energetic cost and the quality of the service provided by the drones as flying base stations. Let us point out that the project topic is highly stimulating from different points of view, and it opens virtually unlimited problems, since a variety of performance metrics can be considered as well as a large set of optimization parameters and, last but not least, different prior information. From a methodological point of view, the project will address theoretical and algorithmic developments as well as applications to real dataset. Furthermore, the activity is deeply rooted into national and international collaborations with US laboratories, and it will exploit of cutting edge technologies under different respect, such as i) drone radio interface modelling and programming, ii) deep learning based flight planning algorithms, iii) green/ brown energy availability models to cite a few, iv) UAV cognitive radio capabilities.
Given the technical challenges of the QoE-aware green UAVs flight planning problem, the expertise and the well-established cooperation of the project participant, and the promising outcomes of preliminary research already published by the project components, we expect the project to achieve timely, relevant, high impact research results.