An Open Source and System-Level Simulator for the Internet of Drones

The Internet of Drones (IoD) represents a keyenabling paradigm for the Internet of Mobile Things. By of-fering smart interactions among unmanned aerial vehicles,i.e., drones, it promises to support many advanced services,spanning from control signaling and traffic managementto real-time applications and multimedia streaming. Froma networking perspective, IoD should face heterogeneousarchitectures and extremely dynamics topologies, whileensuring the different levels of quality of service expectedfor the enabled applications. In this context, the definitionof novel communication protocols and algorithms must beproperly supported by valid instruments able to model theoverall network architecture, as well as to evaluate andimprove its performance. To meet these goals, this workproposes an open source and system-level simulator forthe IoD. Developed on top of the well-known NetworkSimulator 3, it implements the key networking elements(drones, network access points, and Zone Service Provider),a standard-compliant communication stack based on theIEEE 802.11 technology, and scenarios with various mobil-ity model. Thanks to its native modularity, the simulatoris ready to be used for investigating the performance ofcustomizable scenarios with a variable number of drones,and can be easily extended with new functionalities