Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have experienced rapid adoption across multipledomains; however, most existing systems remain monolithic, mission-specificand tightly coupled to the aircraft itself. Traditional deployments typically relyon isolated platforms, manual piloting and application-specific configurations,limiting scalability and interoperability. As the demand for complex, large-scaleand data-driven services increases, there is a clear shift toward integrating UAVsinto broader distributed ecosystems where they operate as service providersrather than standalone assets. This transition introduces significant challenges,including reliable connectivity in remote or infrastructure-poor environments, efficient management of distributed UAV fleets and applications and the needfor seamless orchestration across heterogeneous network and computing layers. Addressing these challenges requires a paradigm shift from UAV-centric designto service-centric, ecosystem-driven architectures. This ...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have experienced rapid adoption across multipledomains; however, most existing systems remain monolithic, mission-specificand tightly coupled to the aircraft itself. Traditional deployments typically relyon isolated platforms, manual piloting and application-specific configurations,limiting scalability and interoperability. As the demand for complex, large-scaleand data-driven services increases, there is a clear shift toward integrating UAVsinto broader distributed ecosystems where they operate as service providersrather than standalone assets. This transition introduces significant challenges,including reliable connectivity in remote or infrastructure-poor environments, efficient management of distributed UAV fleets and applications and the needfor seamless orchestration across heterogeneous network and computing layers. Addressing these challenges requires a paradigm shift from UAV-centric designto service-centric, ecosystem-driven architectures. This thesis addresses this gap by proposing and engineering a service-centric UAV edge system, transforming conventional UAVs into autonomous, network aware and computationally capable edge nodes. The main objective is to enableUAVs to execute application-level services, while being abstracted from low-levelflight operations. To achieve this, the work integrates hardware and software components, including onboard computing platforms, adaptive communication subsystems (4G/5G, NB-IoT and satellite links) and lightweight container orchestration mechanisms. Particular emphasis is placed on hardware integration, including power management, communication modules and autopilot–companion computer interaction. The thesis further introduces a unified software stack enabling containerized service execution, mission-aware control and network adaptives cheduling. The proposed system evolves UAVs into components of adistributed ecosystem capable of supporting autonomous service deployment and execution.The proposed architecture is validated through extensive laboratory and real-world field trials, focusing on both system performance and operational feasibility. Experimental evaluations include autonomous inspection missions, edge processing services and communication performance analysis under differentnet work conditions. Special emphasis is given to the use of terrestrial and satellite Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) as a novel alternative for UAV communications in remote areas, enabling store-and-forward data transmission and energy efficient connectivity. Additionally, advanced networking concepts such as aerial relay nodes and hybrid communication architectures are experimentally assessed, demonstrating the feasibility of maintaining connectivity in underserved environments. These trials provide quantitative insights into power consumption, latency, throughput and system stability, validating the practical applicabilityof the proposed approach. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 1 introduces the motivation andcontributions. Chapter 2 reviews background and related work. Chapter 3 presents the UAV edge node system and architecture. Chapter 4 details theconnectivity layer evaluation. Chapter 5 describes the cloud–fog–edge ecosystem.Chapter 6 presents the field trial validation. Chapter 7 concludes with limitationsand future research directions.
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