UB-ANC: An Open Platform Testbed for Software-Defined Airborne Networking and Communications

We present the University at Buffalo’s Software-Defined Airborne Networking and Communications Testbed (UB-ANC). UB-ANC is an open software/hardware platform that aims to facilitate rapid testing and repeatable comparative evaluation of various airborne networking and communications protocols at different layers of the network protocol stack. In particular, it combines quadcopters capable of autonomous flight with USRP E310 embedded software-defined radios (SDRs), which enable flexible deployment of novel communications and networking protocols, and real-time reconfigurable cognitive radio frequency (RF) links. This is in contrast to existing airborne network testbeds, which typically rely on inflexible off-the-shelf radios based on fixed standards and protocols, e.g., IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) or IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee). UB-ANC is designed with emphasis on modularity in terms of both hardware and software, which makes it highly customizable. It is built on two open-source frameworks, namely, GNU Radio for the physical and medium access control layers and C++ Qt for the higher layers of the network protocol stack including the network, transport, and application layers. In this paper, we present the hardware and software architectures underlying UB-ANC, describe the implementation and operation of its most important components, and discuss how these components can be modified to achieve desired behaviors.