A Comparative Study of Virtual Infrastructure Management Solutions for UAV Networks

Proceeding of 7th Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications (DroNet) (Dronet'21), June 24, 2021, Virtual, WI, USA, co-located with ACM MobiSys 2021.The promising combination of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with network virtualisation technologies has positively shown many advantages enabling the deployment of communication services over aerial networks, that is, networks conformed by a set of interconnected UAVs. However, this synergy may certainly involve diverse challenges that must be carefully considered. In this respect, this paper compares some of the most common virtual infrastructure management solutions that could potentially be used to deal with virtualised payloads over aerial networks, identifying their main strength and limitations. The paper also presents a preliminary exploration on the utilisation of the Kubernetes virtual infrastructure management platform to support value-added services over UAV networks, showing off its potential as a suitable platform to this purpose.We would like to thank Andrew Mcgregor, Bob Briscoe and Rubén Cuevas Rumín for providing helpful information and comments. The work of Anna Maria Mandalari has been funded by the EU FP7 METRICS (607728) project. The work of Marcelo Bagnulo has been funded by the EU FP7 Trilogy2 (317756) project.Publicad