Trajectory Planning for Adaptive Bitrate Applications of UAVs

Unpeopled Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are generally acknowledged as important clients of any future wide-area wireless communication system. UAVs and their missions cover a very wide range, and their tolerance to temporary degradation or withdrawal of wireless communication service can also be expected to vary widely. We use the ability of adaptive bitrate applications to tolerate the temporary degraded coverage to find shorter paths in trajectory planning. We define the basis of a generic framework to define the UAV’s bitrate requirements and the coverage map. We demonstrate that traditional algorithms like A* and their modifications may produce non-optimal results in many scenarios. These algorithms consider only the cost metric for comparing the paths to the point in the space. In this work, we identified key conditions and metrics that should be considered for trajectory planning in adaptive bitrates. We used this analysis to propose a new heuristic algorithm that finds shorter paths in such scenarios than the modified A* algorithm.