A Novel Low-Latency and Cost-Effective Communication Protocol Design for Internet of Flying Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a popular research area in the last decade as it enables user-friendly designs and applications with simple, low-cost and heterogeneous hardware/devices in many domains. Today, with the advancement in UAV technology, drones are becoming a part/component of IoT applications in the context of the Internet of Flying Things (IoFT). In this promising area, communication problems related to UAVs or drones and how to remediate security vulnerabilities are among the main research topics. Currently, drones use lightweight communication protocol called MAVLink to perform tasks. However, IoT applications may not communicate directly based on a single communication protocol. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on a novel communication protocol design that overcomes the limitations of existing communication protocols and incorporates the Flying things with IoT. In this context, we propose a new protocol that meets the needs of IoFT by combining the functions of MQTT and MAVLink protocols. The proposed protocol aims to achieve significant improvements in network throughput, network latency and processing time. © 2021 IEEE.