UAV Location Broadcasting with Wi-Fi SSID

Abstract

To enable widespread and safe use of drone technologies, it is fundamental to design sense and avoid solutions with low-cost and reliable performance. To this end, broadcasting the drone location and speed is an essential safety requirement. This paper presents a method to broadcast short messages within the SSID of a Wi-Fi network. As a relevant example, we propose to use such messages to broadcast the position and speed of UAVs in a fashion that resembles the ADS-B used in Airplanes. Unlike the existing sense and avoid methods, our approach provides two main advantages. Firstly, it operates in a broadcast manner, meaning that no delay is imposed by establishing a connection. Secondly, no custom hardware is required. Nonetheless, a tradeoff must be made between spending time broadcasting messages and data communication using an actual Wi-Fi connection. Therefore, we introduce a practical broadcast and receive protocol which improves receiving reliability and robustness against jamming. To validate our approach, extensive measurements of broadcast delivery rates have been conducted for multiple broadcasting strategies and the results are presented.