A softwarization architecture for UAVs and WSNs as Part of the cloud environment

The development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and wireless sensor network (WSN) applications depends on the availability of resources in UAVs and sensor nodes. In traditional applications, UAVs obtain the required data from specific sensors. However, this tightly coupled architecture restricts the usage of the infrastructure for specific applications. This paper proposes a softwarization architecture for UAVs and WSNs. In addition, the higher layers are proposed to be part of the cloud to benefit from the various cloud opportunities. The proposed architecture is based on the network softwarization concept and the Software Defined Networks (SDN) concept along with the Network Functional Virtualization (NFV) technologies. These concepts are associated with decoupling the hardware infrastructure from the control layer that virtualizes the infrastructure resources for the higher layers. The architecture is illustrated with an agricultural example for a cooperative system of a WSN and UAVs. We implement a prototype system that consists of a sensing node, UAV, WSN controller, UAV controller, and orchestration layer to provide a proof of concept for the proposed architecture.