System design for drone controlled traffic management

Todays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or drones are widely being used in different platforms with different purposes from military reconnaissance and surveillance missions to meteorological observations and from search and rescue operations to filming for cinema industry. Here, add-on Camera Systems and multi purpose sensors play an important role to collect information about the environment and transfer the obtained data to a desired storage medium. On the other hand, the wireless communication over a broadband communication system is became available with 4th Generation (4G or 4.5G) (Long Term Evolution, LTE) cellular network systems. In fact, theoraticaly, it is possible to reach out 100 MHz bandwidth with LTE. Hence the files that have a big size can be transferred from one node to another in a very short time. On the other side, Voice and Video calls over a packet switched circuit have also become available with LTE. These calls can alternatively be made without impacting user experience over a Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) connection that is integrated with LTE in a heteregenous network (Het-Net). In this thesis study, a system that uses Wi-Fi technology integrated with 4th generation cellular systems in a Het-Net way is designed. Here drone equipped with a mainboard establishes a Wi-Fi Hotspot network to serve the terminals which lack signal from cellular system due to any reason causing from congestion on cellular networks to no cellular network available in a current region. Thus it let its users make Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWifi) calls without any need to make an extra investment for a base station and other equipments. In order to evaluate system performance Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) are chosen as a key performance indicators (KPI). Relationship between speech quality and RSSI is investigated based on regression analysis. Besides that the coverage of the proposed system is given based on altitude and distance. The results obtained from the tests show that a user connected to drone based hotspot network can make a succesfull call till the drone altitude is 180 m. this proves that designed system can be used to reach victims in search and rescue operations where there is no cellular system service is available.