Abstract

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, has resulted in an emerging technology known as the Internet of Drone Things (IoDT). This field permeates many vertical domains such as emergency response, agriculture, surveillance, and urban planning and we observe a large interest both from academia and industry towards IoDT. Nevertheless, IoDT is still an immature topic with many open questions, including the cost of building an IoDT-based environment, expertise, safety, and algorithm development. Therefore, studies using a physical testbed are not well-desired, and hence simulators are the preferred choices. However, current simulators that can be used for the IoDT environments are general-purpose, too resource-intensive, and lack fine control mechanisms for IoDT components, with some requiring expensive licensing. As a solution, we present a new IoDT simulator that is lightweight, flexible, and easy to use, addressing the expense and complexity of current systems. This simulator assists in developing high-level algorithms without the overhead of current simulators. With fine-grain controls of IoDT components such as sensors, actuators, and communication protocols, the simulator provides an extensible simulation environment. We present two scenarios, package delivery, and disaster monitoring, to demonstrate the usefulness of our simulator. This work outlines the potential impact of our simulator in reducing the entry barriers to research and development of IoDT, making advanced IoDT solutions more accessible and cost-effective.

Publications

  1. Evan Blake Putnam, Dylan Nihal Senarath, Giselle Ramirez Urquijo, Cihan Tunc, and Renee Bryce. "A Lightweight Drone Simulator." In 2023 Tenth International Conference on Software Defined Systems (SDS), pp. 52-59. IEEE, 2023.
  2. Fatima Shibli, Burak Tufekci, Cihan Tunc, Renee Bryce. "Streamlined Internet of Drone Things (IoDT) Simulator." Cluster Computing (Submitted)

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