Advanced Co-Simulation Platform for UAV Simulations Under Virtual Wireless Network Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an advanced co-simulation platform that performs the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) simulation and the wireless network simulation concurrently. As UAV-based applications become more advanced and complicated and the commands and data transmitted between UAV and ground control station significantly increase, it is vital to safely and robustly transmit the packets carrying commands and data in a wireless network environment. However, the conventional UAV simulation platforms do not take into account the wireless network conditions encountered in the real-world flight so they cannot sufficiently simulate packet transmission. To address this issue, co-simulation platforms have been developed to verify UAV-based applications under a virtual wireless network environment. However, they still cannot effectively support the co-simulation needed to develop the UAV-based applications. In this paper, we have derived a list of improvements to the conventional co-simulation platform based on analysis of the conventional ones. Based on these improvements, we have developed an advanced co-simulation platform consisting of a UAV simulation part, a wireless network simulation part, and an integration part. In this platform, a two-channel approach was introduced to parallelize the synchronization required for performing the UAV simulation and the wireless network simulation simultaneously. The experimental results carried out on three test scenarios demonstrate that the proposed platform accurately performs co-simulation by efficient interoperation of its three parts and by remarkable reduction of the processing time delay, and that it is extendible due to its modularized software architecture.