AQUILA: A QUIC-Based Link Architecture for Resilient Long-Range UAV Communication
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866909947945549824 |
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| author | Huang, Ximing Rao, Yirui |
| author_facet | Huang, Ximing Rao, Yirui |
| contents | The proliferation of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) applications is critically dependent on resilient, high-bandwidth, and low-latency communication links. Existing solutions face critical limitations: TCP's head-of-line blocking stalls time-sensitive data, UDP lacks reliability and congestion control, and cellular networks designed for terrestrial users degrade severely for aerial platforms. This paper introduces AQUILA, a cross-layer communication architecture built on QUIC to address these challenges. AQUILA contributes three key innovations: (1) a unified transport layer using QUIC's reliable streams for MAVLink Command and Control (C2) and unreliable datagrams for video, eliminating head-of-line blocking under unified congestion control; (2) a priority scheduling mechanism that structurally ensures C2 latency remains bounded and independent of video traffic intensity; (3) a UAV-adapted congestion control algorithm extending SCReAM with altitude-adaptive delay targeting and telemetry headroom reservation. AQUILA further implements 0-RTT connection resumption to minimize handover blackouts with application-layer replay protection, deployed over an IP-native architecture enabling global operation. Experimental validation demonstrates that AQUILA significantly outperforms TCP- and UDP-based approaches in C2 latency, video quality, and link resilience under realistic conditions, providing a robust foundation for autonomous BVLOS missions. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06889 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | AQUILA: A QUIC-Based Link Architecture for Resilient Long-Range UAV Communication Huang, Ximing Rao, Yirui Networking and Internet Architecture Robotics The proliferation of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) applications is critically dependent on resilient, high-bandwidth, and low-latency communication links. Existing solutions face critical limitations: TCP's head-of-line blocking stalls time-sensitive data, UDP lacks reliability and congestion control, and cellular networks designed for terrestrial users degrade severely for aerial platforms. This paper introduces AQUILA, a cross-layer communication architecture built on QUIC to address these challenges. AQUILA contributes three key innovations: (1) a unified transport layer using QUIC's reliable streams for MAVLink Command and Control (C2) and unreliable datagrams for video, eliminating head-of-line blocking under unified congestion control; (2) a priority scheduling mechanism that structurally ensures C2 latency remains bounded and independent of video traffic intensity; (3) a UAV-adapted congestion control algorithm extending SCReAM with altitude-adaptive delay targeting and telemetry headroom reservation. AQUILA further implements 0-RTT connection resumption to minimize handover blackouts with application-layer replay protection, deployed over an IP-native architecture enabling global operation. Experimental validation demonstrates that AQUILA significantly outperforms TCP- and UDP-based approaches in C2 latency, video quality, and link resilience under realistic conditions, providing a robust foundation for autonomous BVLOS missions. |
| title | AQUILA: A QUIC-Based Link Architecture for Resilient Long-Range UAV Communication |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture Robotics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06889 |