In both ammature robotics and commercial UAV’s I’ve seen WiFi used as the wireless control link medium. The vehicle and ground station will act as a wifi AP or STA, either respectively or vice versa, to create a LAN network. In the pixhawk realm that means mavlink over tcp/udp and encryption is all handled within the wifi transport itself.
This system works and scales well provided you allocate enough budget for a good LAN setup like nice POE switches and multiple AP’s.
What i want to know is if there are other proven links besides wifi that can do this. My criteria are as follows:
High bandwidth - Be able to upload large missions quickly.
Multiple Drones/Systems - Swarms of up to hundreds of drones connected to the GCS at once.
Decent range - a few hundred feet at least.
Encryption - yes please.
Let’s look at why typical telemetry links like SiK radios/RFD900/ExpressLRS Airport won’t do:
They aren’t high bandwidth. Most of these telem links prioritize maximum range and deliver bandwidths at a few KB at best. 5ghz Wifi is much faster.
They only work in pairs. For every drone theres a transciever on the ground too. 50 drones in the air? 50 telemetry transcievers on the GCS. Frequency interference becomes a problem at this scale too. Wifi can reliably handle hundreds of clients without interference and transmit to all of them simultaneously.
My question is with these goals in mind is there a wireless transciever link system besides wifi common in robotics that can fulfill these criteria or is wifi going to remain the best system with these large scale applications? This is for a low cost drone show swarm.