Csep-Reading-9A

SkyCore: Moving Core to the Edge for Untethered and Reliable UAV-based LTE Networks

It feels fitting to end this class with a paper on SkyCore, a technology built made possible only from the rich history of networks dating back many decades that we've covered in class, but one that seems very futuristic and sci-fi-esque. However, the tech exists today and, as demonstrated in this paper, is seeing active development and exciting advances. I personally find the natural disaster motivations for this research particularly salient.

This paper's main contributions are a proposal and implementation to push evolved packet core (EPC) to the extreme edge of the network; in this case, that means colocated with the base stations (BSs) on the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Current efforts involving UAV mounted BSs have instead had EPCs on the ground or in the cloud; however, this has the drawback of either limiting UAV mobility (wired EPC-UAV link) or being entirely too brittle with respect to traffic demand/capacity, reliability/robustness, and UAV reachability (wireless EPC-UAV link).

There are two main problems to overcome in this approach:

1. implementing EPC in a resource-constrained environment,
2. managing the network with distributed EPCs instead of a central gateway.
   And SkyCore handles both of these by rewriting existing a bunch of EPC to be more compute-efficient, and adding an API for inter-EPC communication. Other than these software advances, the rest of the paper is mostly about actually deploying and evaluating SkyCore on drones.