Mobile SDN-Based Drone Network for Real-Time Video Streaming in Aerial Surveillance

This paper presents and evaluates a drone network based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for real-time video transmission aimed at aerial surveillance. The architecture uses a wired backbone of access points (APs) managed by the Ryu controller, employing the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to prevent loops, while the drones act as wireless nodes that transmit real-time video to a base station simulating the control center. The simulation integrates CoppeliaSim and Mininet-WiFi through a socket server, and video streaming is generated using VLC. Scalability is studied by increasing the number of drones from three to seven, analyzing metrics such as: effective throughput, which increases from 2.75 to 7.21 Mbit/s; average bandwidth, which remains between 6.93 and 7.99 Mbit/s; jitter, which stays below 1 ms; and round-trip time (RTT), which ranges from 8.53 to 8.99 ms, while packet loss increases from 21.34% to 24.43%. When comparing different propagation model exponents for three drones, RTT increases from 12.57 ms (exponent 2) to 18.53 ms (exponent 4), while throughput remains around 2.75–2.76 Mbit/s and packet loss between 31% and 32%. Overall, the architecture scales adequately up to five drones and shows moderate congestion with seven. As future work, it is proposed to extend the architecture to networks with multiple SDN controllers and to study drone-specific routing protocols for video transmission, incorporating the analysis of Quality of Experience (QoE), Quality of Service (QoS), and energy consumption.