  Infrastructure assistance has been proposed as a viable solution to improve
the capabilities of commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), especially
toward fully autonomous operations. The airborne nature of these devices
imposes constrains limiting the onboard available energy supply and computing
power. The assistance of the surrounding communication and computing
infrastructure can mitigate such limitations by extending the communication
range and taking over the execution of compute-intense tasks. However,
autonomous operations impose specific, and rather extreme in some cases,
demands to the infrastructure. Focusing on flight assistance and task
offloading to edge servers, this paper presents an in-depth evaluation of the
ability of the communication infrastructure to support the necessary flow of
information from the UAV to the infrastructure. The study is based on our
recently proposed FlyNetSim, an open-source UAV-network simulator accurately
modeling both UAV and network operations.
