Drone services: an investigation via prototyping and simulation

Although drones are currently used in many outdoor and indoor applications, still there are numerous opportunities to be explored by combining drones with other accessible, adaptable and emerging technologies, for example, cell phones, smartwatches, and Internet-of-Things appliances. In this paper, we propose and investigate an approach to using drones to provide services, one where drones act as fly-in-fly-out servers (edge computing style) in order to collect data, provide Internet access, and process data for mobile users. Our study simulates drones providing services, not restricted to edge computing services. We provide anecdotal experiments on factors affecting drone service delivery.