End-to-End Full-Stack Drone Measurements: A Case Study Using AERPAW

While a lot of studies have been made to include drone communications in the 5th Generation of Mobile Networks (5G), it is still arguable how reliably current air-to-ground infrastructures can perform. To apply a further boost to this research direction, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently funded the Aerial Experimentation Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW) for the creation of a high-end publicly available testbed. Considering the current lack in the literature of experimental studies carried out with open testbeds, in this paper we target two contributions. First, we use AERPAW for the end-to-end evaluation of the performance of an emulated Uplink (UL) traffic between an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and a Fixed Node (FN), connected through an open source LTE network software (srsRAN). Second, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of the results obtained from our experiments, we made our testbed's configuration files and collected dataset available to the public, to provide a reference for future research on UAV communication, enabled by AERPAW.