Data collected at Hurricane Ian (2022) quantifies the demands that small uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), or drones, place on the network communication infrastructure and identifies gaps in the field. Drones have been increasingly used since Hurricane Katrina (2005) for disaster response, however getting the data from the drone to the appropriate decision makers throughout incident command in a timely fashion has been problematic. These delays have persisted even as countries such as the USA have made significant investments in wireless infrastructure, rapidly deployable nodes, and an increase in commercial satellite solutions. Hurricane Ian serves as a case study of the mismatch between communications needs and capabilities. In the first four days of the response, nine drone teams flew 34 missions under the direction of the State of Florida FL-UAS1, generating 636GB of data. The teams had access to six different wireless communications networks but had to resort to physically transferring data to the nearest intact emergency operations center in order to make the data available to the relevant agencies. The analysis of the mismatch contributes a model of the drone data-to-decision workflow in a disaster and quantifies wireless network communication requirements throughout the workflow in five factors. Four of the factors-availability, bandwidth, burstiness, and spatial distribution-were previously identified from analyses of Hurricanes Harvey (2017) and Michael (2018). This work adds upload rate as a fifth attribute. The analysis is expected to improve drone design and edge computing schemes as well as inform wireless communication research and development.

翻译：2022年飓风伊恩期间采集的数据量化了小型无人机系统（UAS，或称无人机）对网络通信基础设施的需求，并指出了该领域的不足。自2005年飓风卡特里娜以来，无人机在灾害响应中的应用日益增多，但如何将数据及时从无人机传送到事故指挥系统内相关决策者手中仍存在问题。即使美国等国家已在无线基础设施、快速部署节点以及商业卫星解决方案方面投入巨资，这些延迟依然存在。飓风伊恩成为通信需求与能力不匹配的典型案例。在灾害响应的前四天，九个无人机团队在佛罗里达州FL-UAS1指挥下执行了34次任务，生成了636GB数据。这些团队可使用六种不同的无线通信网络，但最终不得不采用物理传输方式将数据送至最近完好的应急运营中心，以便相关机构获取数据。分析这一不匹配现象，我们构建了灾害场景下无人机数据到决策流程的模型，并量化了该流程中无线网络通信需求的五个关键因素。其中四个因素——可用性、带宽、突发性和空间分布——此前已从飓风哈维（2017年）和飓风迈克尔（2018年）的分析中得出。本研究新增了上传速率作为第五个属性。该分析有望改进无人机设计及边缘计算方案，并为无线通信研发提供参考依据。