Drone Remote Identification System Using Different Wireless COTS Radios: A Benchmarking Study

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are gaining more attention owing to the versatile use cases that they can support. They are also considered as an integral part of the sixth generation (6G) and beyond networks. However, with increasing UAVs, there comes a requirement to regulate their movement in the airspace. Such regulations can provide better management and mitigate safety and security concerns. As such, direct remote identification (DRI) is one approach which allows authorities to identify any drone in the airspace and provides information about drones in flight, such as the drone’s identity, location, altitude and its control station or take-off location. Although, there has been numerous research performed on DRI and respective topics, but none of them proposed usage of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) wireless radio modules along with DRI. To overcome this problem, we evaluate DRI using various COTS under the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth use cases and later presented a comparative analysis of long-range frequency and power consumption for such COTS modules. At last, we also shed some light on the security aspects.