The Tactile Internet for the flight control of UAV flocks

This paper presents a software architecture, based on the Tactile Internet 5G network slice, to control a flock of UAVs performing a monitoring mission. In contrast to classical approaches for UAV flock control, which employ ad-hoc software running directly on board of of UAVs, we propose a solution in which flock and mission control tasks run at the edge of a 5G network; the architecture takes advantage of the Tactile Internet to implement a ultra-low latency communication link needed to send driving commands to UAVs. As a result, the deployment of computations in the edge provides many advantages, in terms of scalability and fault-tolerance, and avoids processing latencies, due to communication links, that represent an important drawback in traditional solutions.