Multipath Transport Analysis Over Cellular and LEO Access for Aerial Vehicles

Recent industrial advancements introduce novel safety-critical applications for commercial networks. Remote Piloting (RP) Aerial Vehicles (AVs) is an example application, where reliable wireless connectivity is key to ensure safe operations in the sky. Jointly utilizing cellular and satellite networks can enable robust Multipath (MP) communications; however, their usage must be orchestrated efficiently toward application requirements. In this work, we investigate the MP communications performance of cellular and Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite links with respect to the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of RP operations. Using MP-Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) and MP-Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (MP-DCCP), we evaluate various transport layer configurations to efficiently orchestrate both links and to support the application requirements. For this purpose, we develop an end-to-end MP emulation testbed that can provide means to realistically emulate cellular and LEO links with MPTCP and MP-DCCP. We run bi-direction al RP traffic over our testbed and measure the MP performance using different schedulers and Congestion Control (CC) algorithms. The results show that the flow size largely influences the individual path utilization due to high LEO link-layer losses. Moreover, excessive retransmissions occur on the MPTCP layer due to Head-of-Line (HoL) blocking from asymmetric link conditions. Using MP-DCCP without retransmissions helps avoid late arrivals and can meet the 99.999% communication reliability demand.