Psched: A Priority-Based Service Scheduling Scheme for the Internet of Drones

With the continuous miniaturization of sensors and processors and ubiquitous wireless connectivity, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also referred to as drones, are finding many new uses in enhancing our life and paving the way to the realization of Internet of Drones (IoD). In the IoD, a myriad of multisized and heterogeneous drones seamlessly interact with Zone Service Providers (ZSPs) to achieve the goal of assisting drones in accessing controlled airspace and providing navigation services. However, due to the high mobility of drones and the limited communication bandwidth between drones and ZSP, service scheduling becomes a critical issue when a set of drones wants to upload/download data to/from ZSP. In this article, we propose a priority-based service scheduling scheme, also named Psched, to provide efficient data upload/download service at ZSP in the IoD. The basic idea is that the Psched objectively and equitably assigns a weight to multiple service scheduling parameters based on multiattribute decision making theory, calculates the serving priority of each service request group, and then serves the service request groups based on the calculated serving priority accordingly. In addition, the Psched takes into account of bandwidth competition between upload and download service requests, and provides a service request balancing to achieve the maximum benefits of service scheduling scheme. In the experimental study, we choose request deadline, data size, and data popularity as service scheduling parameters, and conduct extensive simulation experiments using OMNeT++ for performance evaluation and comparison. The simulation results show that the proposed priority-based service scheduling scheme can not only increase service ratio but also can improve fresh data service ratio and average request serving latency, indicating a viable and efficient approach for satisfying service requests at ZSP in the IoD.