UPFlight: An enabler for Avionic MEC in a drone-extended 5G mobile network

The interest in extending the range of mobile networks by means of drones, which carry a cellular radio base station or even a complete mobile core, is continuously increasing in research as well as in industry. Whereas the asset in such solutions is well motivated, various practical aspects are not fully considered, such as weight, power consumption and associated flight time of such drones, which usually carry limited and expensive mobile energy resources. In this paper we leverage various advantageous architectural and operational aspects of a 5G Mobile Core and propose the use of a low-cost system-on-chip solution on board of a drone to realize a flying 5G User Plane Function, which serves as data plane anchor to mobile devices attaching to the cellular base station co-located with the drone and enables offloading traffic to services, which can run on the system-on-chip board as well. We prototyped a standard-conform User Plane Function by means of the open source fd.io project for Vector Packet Processing and enabled mobile access to flying lightweight mobile edge services. The paper describes how the drone system operates with the architecture backend in the fixed infrastructure and presents experimentally determined performance figures, comparing the developed low-costs flying edge services with a setup, which deploys the 5G User Plane Function as well as services in the fixed infrastructure.