Service-centric UAV edge nodes: Architecture and field validation

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly popular across a wide range of civilian domains, from precision agriculture and environmental monitoring to infrastructure inspection and emergency response, driven by rapid advances in flight autonomy, onboard sensing and miniaturized computing hardware. Yet, for UAVs to move beyond mission-specific deployments and become truly integrated into daily operations, their role must evolve: rather than functioning as flight-centric platforms that execute predefined flight plans, they need to operate as service-centric edge computing nodes capable of dynamically hosting, executing and managing application services onboard. This paper presents a service-centric UAV edge node architecture that integrates lightweight Kubernetes (K3s) container orchestration on an ARM-based companion computer within a cloud–fog–edge continuum. The system enables dynamic deployment of containerized applications during flight, through a user-facing web portal. Recognizing that UAV operations in rural, remote or disaster-affected environments frequently encounter degraded or absent broadband terrestrial coverage, the paper further proposes and experimentally validates Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) connectivity, both terrestrial and satellite, as an innovative alternative communication solution of last resort. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental implementation of NB-IoT on UAV edge platforms. The NB-IoT link operates as a bidirectional channel, supporting uplink delivery of AI inference results and telemetry as well as downlink reception of mission commands such as arming, takeoff, waypoint updates and mode changes. Two complementary paths are evaluated: (i) terrestrial NB-IoT, providing near real-time connectivity validated through laboratory and real outdoor UAV flight tests with 0% packet loss across 324 messages and 1–2 s end-to-end latency; and (ii) Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) NB-IoT via a real 5G LEO satellite testbed, demonstrating reliable store-and-forward data offloading under realistic orbital constraints. The results demonstrate that NB-IoT provides a viable, standards-based fallback connectivity layer for service-centric UAV edge systems operating beyond the reach of broadband networks.