Edge computing support for high-scale drone networks

 

Drone applications are exploding, in areas like inspection, surveillance and cargo delivery.  They place serious requirements on the internet’s compute, storage and networking capabilities.  This presentation will look at the hierarchy of computer networks required to support safe, secure and smart drone fleet operations at scale, with special emphasis on edge computing.

To achieve large-scale autonomous fleet operation, the flight control computers on the drones must be supplemented with intelligent ground stations, local and regional compute clusters and cloud datacenters, along with embedded storage and all the networking to interconnect them.  We will look at several architectures and implementation alternatives for these complex, hierarchal networks.