Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Drones are rapidly transforming various sectors, offering unique applications in disaster relief, precision agriculture, and security. The strategic integration of drones into Canada's airspace is a national priority, aiming to harness the full potential of the Internet of Drones (IoD). However, the current drone ecosystem faces significant challenges in mobility, connectivity, and handover management, necessitating innovative solutions for efficient airspace organization, collision avoidance, and mobility and data management. This proposal is devoted to developing the foundation towards the design an innovative IoD unfrastructure which shall deal with all of these challenging problems. To do so, in this program, we aim to design and develop an intelligent architecture for a city-wide IoT-enabled drone network, ensuring seamless integration with other networks, efficient mobility connectivity and data management, drones' path prediction while guaranteeing high quality of services and security. Therefore, we plan first to fundamentally understand the complexities of mobility, location and data management in IoD networking, considering the dynamic nature of drones' autonomy and movement, and the challenges of real-time drones' path prediction; then develop scalable communication protocols for D2D/D2X that shall leverage the characteristics of drones mobility for gathering aerial data, consequently, integrating drones' trajectory data mining into drones'  mobility management and focusing on enhancing the drone's performance in terms of mobility and path prediction, connectivity and coverage, data gathering ad well as  reducing the volume of unnecessary data exchanged among drones required for targeted applications and energy efficiency.  The PI is responding to the growing demands of Internet of Drones by both government nd industries. This program is expected to enhance the capabilities of drones, and produce the knowledge and principle that will lead to the development of a new era in the drones networking and service provisioning system for IoD based applications. The anticipated impact of this proposed research is quite substantial while advancing the field of IoD and fostering technological innovation and strengthening Canada's leadership in the drone technology. This proposal not only aims to enhance the capabilities of drones but also provides significant training and development opportunities for Highly Qualified Personnel in this promising and emerging IoD field  while assisting the Canadian industries to be the frontrunner of the IoD technological advancements.