UAV as a Service: Providing On-Demand Access and On-The-Fly Retasking of Multi-Tenant UAVs Using Cloud Services

As commercial roles for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more well-defined and demand for the services provided by them increases, UAVs rely more on new cloud computing services and co-operative coordination to provide mission planning, control, tracking and data processing. We present UAV as a Service (UAVaaS) framework, which brings features commonly found in traditional cloud services, such as Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as a Service, to the domain of UAVs. Our work aims to conceptualize and design UAVaaS for commercial applications. Specifically, a cloud-provided orchestration framework that allows multi-tenant UAVs to easily serve multiple heterogenous clients at once and automatically re-task them to users with higher priority, mid-flight, if needed. This research utilizes a spiral model design approach to formally define the UAVaaS framework, and to identify key focus areas, protocols, data structures, network topologies, and message patterns. A safety and security analysis is performed to mitigate potential risks that are present in the system and a prototype simulation is implemented as proof of concept

The Middle East in the world hierarchy:imperialism and resistance

This study deploys a structuralist framework of analysis, modified by elements from other theories, to examine the place of the Middle East in the world hierarchy. It surveys the origins of the regional system in imperialism's peripheralisation and fragmentation of the region, the core-periphery clientalist hierarchy thereby established, regional agency within the system, including the foreign policies of dependent and rebellious states, and the on-going struggle over the hierarchical order between revisionist forces in the Middle East and the global hegemons