A methodology for measuring UAV-to-UAV communications performance

Currently we can witness how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have suddenly become an active research area, and are enjoying widespread acceptance, while also starting to play a relevant role in many areas of our society. Nonetheless, despite significant progress was made in recent years, many more improvements are expected in a near future. In this paper we address the issue of inter-UAV communications by proposing a methodology for performance evaluation based on a tool able to handle operational issues related to tests, along with a set of scripts that automate the statistical analysis of results, producing different types of charts. By deploying actual UAVs in a controlled testbed environment, we performed several experiments and produced output results that evidence the validity and applicability of our approach. Overall, the proposed solution allows accelerating the study of how different wireless technologies perform in such environments by significantly simplifying and automating most of the associated tasks.