Programmable Software-Defined Testbed for Visible Light UAV Networks: Architecture Design and Implementation

As of today, there has been increasing research on designing optimization algorithms and intelligent network control methods for visible light Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) networks to provide pervasive and broadband connections. For those theoretical analysis based algorithms, there is an urgent need to have a visible light UAV network platform that can help evaluate the proposed algorithms in real-world scenarios. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is currently no dedicated high data rate and flexible visible light UAV networking prototype. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first design a novel programmable software-defined architecture for visible light UAV networking, including control plane, network plane, signal processing chain and front-ends plane, and ground facility plane. We then implement a prototype and conduct numerous experiments to validate the feasibility of visible-light UAV networks and further evaluate the system performance pertaining to achievable data rate and transmission distance. The real-time video streaming experimental results show that up to 550 kbps data rate and a maximum distance of 7 meters can be achieved.