SkyHAUL: A Self-Organizing Gigabit Network In The Sky

ABSTRACTWe design and build SkyHaul, the first large-scale, self-organizing network of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are connected using a mm Wave wireless mesh backhaul. While the use of a mmWave backhaul paves the way for a new class of bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive cooperative applications (e.g. LTE coverage during disasters), the network of UAVs allows these applications to be executed at operating ranges that are far beyond the line-of-sight distances that limit individual UAVs today. To realize the challenging vision of deploying and maintaining an airborne, mm Wave mesh backhaul that caters to dynamic applications, SkyHaul's design incorporates various elements: (i) Role-specific UAV operations that simultaneously address application tracking and backhaul connectivity (ii) Novel algorithms to jointly address the problem of deployment (position, yaw of UAVs) and traffic routing across the UAV network; and (iii)A provably optimal solution for fast and safe reconfiguration of UAV backhaul during application dynamics. We evaluate the performance of SkyHaul through both real-world UAV flight operations as well as large scale simulations.