UAVs are increasingly deployed in civilian and defence domains, where reliable communication between multiple platforms is essential. Cooperative UAV swarms, particularly in SAR operations, require resilient communication links to ensure task coordination and data exchange. This thesis investigates the establishment of a baseline for direct UAV-to-UAV communication in unobstructed environments, focusing on the evaluation of fundamental transmission parameters.
The work combined a literature review with experimental field studies. The referenced platform are two multi-rotor UAVs equipped with onboard computing and wireless transceivers. The software environment on the UAVs was simulated on laptops, and they were used to exchange text-based packets using UDP protocols under LOS conditions. Parameters including latency, packet delivery ratio, and transmission distance were measured and analysed.
Results show that end-to-end delays remained within a few hundred milliseconds. The experiments confirm that direct communication between UAVs is feasible for low-speed platforms in baseline LOS scenarios.
The study provides an initial benchmark for UAV-to-UAV communication performance, and it establishes a foundation for future research on resilient FANETs in mission-critical applications.