The Internet of Drones Is Coming

by Michael Byrne, Motherboard

Commercial aviation was born in the later years of World War I, and so too was the need for air traffic control. With a sudden post-war excess of military aircraft, Britain and France began converting their light, reliable bombers into mail planes. Consequently, air traffic density all of a sudden became an imminent hazard, a congested airscape whose danger peaked in 1922, when a Farman Goliath and a De Havilland DH-18 collided 60 nautical miles north of Paris, killing all on board.

Regulators and authorities responded by instituting air traffic corridors and beacon-based navigation systems—and eventually, around 1930, air traffic control towers began appearing in the UK. In 1935, the first Flight Monitoring Center appeared in Newark. It consisted of a clock, a notepad, some navigation charts, and a not-particularly-reliable radio setup. In a couple of decades there would be radar, too.

A similar situation has arisen  with the expanding potential use of drones. Today drones are advanced enough to conceivably be used for delivering goods, but a significant barrier remains in the form of drone traffic density. Robert J. Hall at AT&T Labs believes the answer lies in an “Internet of drones.”

He says drones can best avoid each other if they know about each other, which is the essence of his Geocast Air Operations Framework (GAOF) prototype. “The goal of the work is to demonstrate a path toward an improved system for the operation of drones, with the necessary secure command and control among all legitimate stakeholders, including drone operators, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, law enforcement, private property owners, and citizens,” Hall says.

GAOF is an extension of an existing AT&T technology known just as the Geocast System, which is being tested for similar traffic management applications on the ground, e.g. for people and cars. Obviously, adding a third dimension makes things a bit more complex.

GAOF works by automatically flipping between cellular and wireless ad-hoc network tiers depending on availability. The system also makes use of geographic addressing (GA), which is similar to how subnets work on the Internet. In GA, circles centered around different latitudes and longitudes are assigned their own addresses, which are shared among all drones within that circle. Every device that wishes to monitor an area comes up with a query message, which is then transmitted to a specific geographic address. The drones within that address region send their replies back to the geographic address of the querying drone.  Read the report. Also for a fee you can read Robert j Hall’s article in IEEE Internet Computing.

DCL: GAOF will have to involve lots of CEP if it doesn’t already.