A virtualization approach to validate services and subsystems of a MALE UAS

Current trends in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) aim at embedding intelligent functionality into these devices to enhance their utilization beyond their traditional video monitoring and recording operations, using them as complex mobile computing platforms or to support flexible communication network infrastructures. As a consequence, while UAS necessarily increase their complexity, the whole development cycle of services/applications of UAS, together with the management, operation, testing, validation, and maintenance, becomes even more challenging since the computing hardware has to be onboarded and ready to fly. This article presents a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) surveillance UAS developed by the Spanish Ministry of Defense (the MILANO, from the National Institute of Aerospace Technology), used as a reference for the developments in this paper. The article also presents the virtualization platform that is being used in the system to facilitate the deployment of all the communication service components in the real MILANO platform (e.g., routing, switching, channel selection functionalities), although it also supports other types of applications (e.g., telemetry preprocessing, including sensors and video, route planning). In addition, this platform is complemented by an emulation infrastructure (to reproduce different mobility patterns and radio communication link status) used to boost the whole testing and validation cycle before onboarding the hardware and scheduling expensive flight campaigns, and facilitating the overall UAS software maintenance during the operations phase. Finally, the article describes the experiments performed with the MILANO equipment, validating the application and functionality of the overall platform.