End-to-End Performance Measurements of Drone Communications in 5G Cellular Networks

Cellular communications with its ubiquitous cellular coverage enable various use cases for long-distance aerial inspection, surveillance and monitoring with drones. For these use cases, the exchange of command & control and sensor data, such as video, require a reliable and low-latency communication link. In this paper, we present results of a measurement campaign of drone communications in an experimental 5G network. The measurement scenarios cover (i) the capacity and quality of the link between the drone and the ground station, (ii) the robustness of drone communications with the isolation provided by network slicing, and (iii) the stability of the link between drone and ground station for long-distance flights. The results indicate that cellular communications in principle meet the reliability and latency of video and command & control data for long-distance flights even when the performance of cellular network is optimized for terrestrial devices. The application of network slicing in future 5G networks has a great potential to protect the drone critical command & control data from undesired wireless interferers.