# Communication Manager for Hyper-Connected RPAS Environments
## 5 Conclusions and Future Work  
This article introduces the CIM for multi-interface RPA environments following an SDN approach. It demonstrates that the CIM improves communications management in multi-RPA environments for creating and establishing networks using different technologies and for selecting the most appropriate communications depending on different strategies/policies. These strategies include the automatic selection of the best channel based on any network parameter/metric, load balancing, or static/predefined policies. It also presents a reference scenario, where all the stages to properly achieve communication between the domains through all the available interfaces are detailed.  
Moreover, once the system is introduced, two laboratory experiences have been reported to showcase the CIM prospect compared to traditional RPA systems, where the communication between RPA and RPS domains only involves the radio interface. These experiments have produced a testbed available in the 5 TONIC laboratory, where all the Labyrinth project advances will be tested. In addition, initial flight tests have demonstrated the transferability between laboratory developments and their application in real equipment.  
In the same way, this testbed will be used to work on the different research lines listed hereafter.  
Figure 8: Flight campaign experiment. (**a**) INTA’s external pilot performing pre-flight operations; (**b**) INTA’s operators setting up the mobile GCS.  
Shortly, we will work on further flight experiments, taking into account not only the creation of the infrastructure and the enabling of the different communication channels but also testing the possibility of making changes to the communication interfaces based on the different parameters collected by the network monitoring application.  
Secondly, the initial version of the CIM sends, by default, all the control traffic (from the OvS to the controller and vice versa) through the 4G/LTE interface, as it is considered that it will always be active. However, in specific scenarios, this assumption will only sometimes be valid. It is, therefore, necessary to work on different mechanisms that allow us to send control information through the different interfaces to ensure that it reaches its destination.  
Lastly, we will consider integrating into the CIM software innovative solutions such as intent-based networking [31] for defining communication requirements that the RPA network is assumed to deliver.  
Conceptualization, V.S.-A., F.V. and I.V.; methodology, V.S.-A., F.V. and I.V.; software, V.S.-A. and B.N.; validation, V.S.-A. and F.V.; formal analysis, V.S.-A. and F.V.; investigation, V.S.-A., F.V. and I.V.; resources, F.V.; data curation, V.S.-A.; writing--original draft preparation, V.S.-A. and F.V.; writing--review and editing, V.S.-A., F.V., I.V. and B.N.; visualization, V.S.-A. and F.V.; supervision, F.V. and I.V.; project administration, F.V.; funding acquisition, F.V. and I.V. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This article has been partially supported by the H2020 Labyrinth project (grant agreement 861696), the H2020 5 GZORRO project (grant agreement 871533), and by the TRUE5G project (PID2019-108713 RB681) funded by the Spanish National Research Agency.  
Not applicable.  
The authors wish to thank [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] for their support during the experiments.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.