DroneCAST – Analysis of Requirements and Discussion of First Design Decisions

The German national project Drone Communication and Surveillance Technology (DroneCAST) focuses on the initial design of a drone-to-drone communications system which is used as a safety net for urban air traffic management. The need for such a system arises from the increasing interest in urban air mobility, the growing density of urban flight movements, and the effort to reduce the number of mid-air collision to a minimum. A well-known method to enable reliable collision avoidance among neighboring vehicles is the periodic broadcast of position reports by an ad-hoc communications system, e.g. DroneCAST. In this paper, we describe the use case and analyze the system’s requirements at first. Subsequently, we investigate popular physical and medium access layer designs with respect to their suitability for DroneCAST.