A 5G platform for Unmanned Aerial Monitoring in Rural Areas: Design and Performance Issues
Giuseppe Faraci, Angelo Raciti, Santi Agatino Rizzo, Giovanni Schembra · 2018
Smart agriculture, representing one of the use cases for Industry 4.0, encounters some deployment problems in wide rural areas where neither telecommunications infrastructure, nor a local power grid is available. For this reason, this paper proposes a comprehensive platform constituted by a Flying Ad hoc NETwork (FANET) to provide connectivity, and a 5G network access node equipped with MEC facilities to run software applications at the edge of the network. Power supply for the 5G base station, the drones to be periodically recharged and the servers in the data center equipped with MEC facilities is realized by an electrical hybrid generator. An analytical model of the whole system is also defined to capture all the above issues, and supporting the design of the proposed system.