Media and non-media WebRTC communication between a terrestrial station and a drone: the case of a flying IoT system to monitor parking

Abstract

In this paper we propose a flying IoT system designed to monitor parking lot. The system is composed of a flying mobile station and a terrestrial station. The mobile station consists of visual monitoring camera associated with air quality monitoring sensors, mounted on a Turnigy SK450 quad copter controlled with Pixhawk autopilot hardware. Data gathered from the monitoring system are transmitted to an IoT broker running on a Raspberry Pi 3+ microcontroller, also mounted on a drone, that aggregates data into a common flow and retransmits them to the terrestrial station. The transmission system was build according to WebRTC architecture. In order to assure separation of the production network (for transmission of application data) and the management network (for management and control purposes), two different transmission channels are used: one for the WebRTC transmission and the other for controlling the drone. The paper includes a description of the system and the results of field trials carried out on the parking lot of the AGH University of technology.