Monitoring routing status of UAV networks with NB-IoT

UAV networks are difficult to monitor and many new routing protocols are difficult to assess on UAV networks. In this paper, we propose NBMon, an NB-IoT-based monitoring system for UAV networks, which can identify routing abnormalities and upload routing tables from the host device to a control station through the NB-IoT network. At the same time, the control station can send commands to the monitored devices to change routes. NBMon has the benefits of NB-IoT including low energy consumption, low cost, and non-interference to existing Wi-Fi channels. It also addresses the challenge of no global IP address of the existing NB-IoT infrastructure, where both the NB-IoT modules and the control station are behind NAT and do not have global IP addresses. This is done by a NAT traversal subsystem on top of NB-IoT, which has unique operation requirements and existing traversal systems do not work. We implement NBMon with commercial-off-the-shelf devices and evaluate it in real networks.