## 1 Introduction
### Motivating Example  
Our motivating example and research hypothesis in this paper can be outlined as follows. A motivating scenario of a convoy of drones hovering over the Darling Harbour of Sydney (Australia) is shown in Figure 1. A navy ship is visiting a civilian port at the Darling Harbour. A festival (e.g., New Year's Eve) is taking place, and the ship has docked alongside the wharf. Improvised hazards to the ship might be experienced when the ship approaches the Harbour or offshore. The area is highly congested, consisting of many people, vehicles, media, and buildings. The Harbour is temporarily secured, so access to the ship is highly restricted. The safety of the ship and its crew, together with the public attending the event and residing in the neighborhood, is highly important.  
Various possible dangers in and around the wharf and across the neighborhood must be monitored continuously, detected precisely, and resolved in real time. The responses should be seamless, without any adverse impact, and not be detrimental to the public and properties. To this end, we advocate a solution considering a convoy of drones for surveillance (high-definition video) over the Harbour area using an 802.11_ay_ antenna array system as discussed in Figure 1. We use the blueprint of [[https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-sydney-darling-harbour-convention-model-1304512](https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-sydney-darling-harbour-convention-model-1304512)]([https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-sydney-darling-harbour-convention-model-1304512](https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-sydney-darling-harbour-convention-model-1304512)), (accessed on 20 November 2022).  
To elaborate, in such a mobile environment of the _Internet of Drones_, it is highly challenging and non-trivial to meet real-time constraints and mobility control requirements over \(802.11 ay\) networks. More than just an increase in speed, in congested areas such as stadiums and festivals, IEEE \(802.11 ay\) has been designed with MIMO beamforming and antenna arrays to facilitate multi-connectivity and improved performance. However, mobility-induced handoffs are critical in \(802.11 ay\) because of the smaller coverage of mmWaves, which adversely affects the performance of the MPTCP flows when used for surveillance of the harbor areas with HD video streaming.  
As mentioned, the mobility of nodes often causes frequent handoffs, timeouts, and Doppler effects due to the small coverage area. The handover process of mmWave WiFi in _multiple access points_ (APs) environment is quite complex and involves several network signaling, which is time-consuming. Such a handover procedure increases delay, making it impracticable for future real-time communication and control applications. Therefore, our primary focus in this work is to alleviate the need for handoffs by ablating the proven features of multi-connectivity from the TRA layer (e.g., MPTCP [5]) over \(802.11 ay\) networks for real-time video streaming and control (e.g., actuation, automation, orchestration of a convoy of drones for surveillance).  
With such a multi-connectivity driven by an efficient cross-layer architecture forming a tightly coupled TRA-MAC-PHY layers mechanisms over multiple paths, IEEE\(802.11 ay\) Task Group's visions, to efficiently harness advances in PHY/MAC Layer technology, including MIMO, beamforming, and channel bonding, to enhance performance and reliability by multiple orders of magnitude, could become a reality at the application level.  
Complementary to PHY/MAC-Layer advances, TRA layer multipath TCP solutions (for addressing handoffs and harnessing bandwidths) apply load-balanced control over several links to provide end-to-end multipath network flow and ease congestion; see [6] and the references therein, e.g., MPTCP [5; 7] and emerging multipath versions of QUIC (MPQUIC) [8]. The scheduling mechanism in MPTCP and not-so-futuristic MPQUIC plays a critical role in efficiently allocating packets over the surrounding multiple links simultaneously.