# Adaptable and Automated Small UAV Deployments via Virtualization
## 1 Introduction  
The progressive evolution witnessed by the small unmanned aircraft systems during the last ten years, in conjunction with the services and products that can be offered by this kind of systems, have led to their consideration as an earnest candidate to support the development of new emergent civilian applications. A small unmanned aircraft system includes a Ground Control Station (GCS) that monitors and controls the operation of a set of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (small UAVs or SUAVs). These SUAVs may have different capabilities (e.g., through an heterogeneous set of on-boarded sensors), and can be deployed over a delimited geographical area to provide a particular service. In contrast to a usual use case where the services provided by SUAVs are oriented towards the collection of data (e.g., sensor values, video images, etc. ), as well as their transmission to a ground station, the research community and the industry have recently considered the development of new value-added services and applications where SUAVs play a fundamental role. Among these, we can mention remote sensing in surveillance operations [1], agribusiness [2], collaborative search and rescue [3; 4; 5; 6; 7], building aerial sensor networks to aid disaster management [8], or supporting backbone communications to mobile ground stations [9]. On the other hand, the advent of the new generation of mobile networks (i.e., 5G) imposes new and stringent requisites to guarantee a fair balance between speed, latency and cost of communications, which are expected to be potentially originated by millions of connected devices. For that purpose,the shared use of resources, allowing the dynamic provision of network functions, is foreseen as one of the key enablers of this new generation of networks. In this context, the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigm presents an innovative solution in the sector of information and communication technologies, aiming at supporting the active and high-performance processing of traffic delivered across 5G networks. Under the above considerations, this paper presents a practical approach based on NFV technologies to support SUAV deployments that can be rapidly adapted to civilian missions with different objectives. In this approach, SUAVs offer an NFV programmable infrastructure that enables the agile integration of services and functions, which may be determined by the operator of the SUAVs at deployment time. As an example (as shown in Figure 1), SUAVs could be deployed to provide a communications infrastructure over a disaster area, where networking facilities are insufficient or unavailable (e.g., due to an earthquake or during firefighting activity). In this example, a set of SUAVs could be used to deploy virtualized access points and routing functions, creating an aerial communication infrastructure over the deployment area. In addition, some SUAV units could execute the diverse components of an IP telephony service, thus enabling real-time voice and video communications among the ground units operated by the emergency response team. Some aerial vehicles could be configured to obtain and disseminate video images and temperature readings, improving the situational awareness and, consequently, the effectiveness of the adopted response actions. Furthermore, the same SUAVs could later be used in a different mission, such as a search and rescue operation in a remote area. In this case, the flight control unit carried by the SUAVs could be upgraded for certain aircrafts in the deployment, with the purpose of tracing different flight trajectories for an efficient inspection of a delimited search area.