Smart City
In 2018, Amazon is more than just the largest online book directory. It is in fact the largest eCommerce giant and one of the companies with highest revenues worldwide. However, the ambitions of its owner, Jeff Bezos, who is now the richest person in the world, do not seem to die with this.
The company that Bezos founded in 1994 is now well-known for developing delivery drones as well as delivering data through its Amazon Web Services platform. Therefore, it had to be only a matter of time before someone at the company came up with the idea of delivering their data via drones.
As a former principal product manager at Amazon Web Services, Abdul Sathar Salt was a man with vision. He originally came up with the idea of drones providing data services in 2014 – way ahead of time and definitely way ahead of the ‘golden years’ of this technology.
Even though Sathar Salt moved to Oracle Cloud years after that, his proposed patent still belongs to Amazon. Named “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Data Services,” the patent describes a system by which network users can order data services and receive them with the help of drones.
As Salt described it in the patent application:
“The UAV may include a large-capacity [data] storage device and a high-speed data interface. If the user computing device is located at a remote location where network bandwidth may be scarce, or if the amount of data is too large relative to the network bandwidth, an associate user may turn to the UAV.”
What’s also important to note is that in this system, the drone could carry equipment to beef up its wireless data network throughout when bandwidth would be otherwise scarce. Or, the syste could upload data from the user’s computer and carry it someplace else for the transfer to a central data server, just like a bee carrying pollen to the hive.
Salt, as well as many engineers in the AWS division, knew that there has to be a strong authentication system to confirm that users are who they say they are – and that they are in the right location for transmission. All in order for the data streams to be transmitted securely to the right places.
As the patent reads:
“Multiple UAVs may be deployed to provide security. For example, rather than providing a whole block of data from the recipient computing device to the UAV, the data may be divided into sub-blocks. Each of the blocks may be provided to one of the UAVs. As such, if one of the UAVs is compromised (e.g., the corresponding computing system is accessed by an unauthorized third party), only the corresponding sub-block of data may be at risk, rather than the whole data block.”
The payment method includes fees charged based on several factors. As Salt planned it back in the day, “the higher the number of UAVs there is, the more distant the recipient computing device, the larger data amount, or the faster delivery may be – the higher the charge may become.”
In the end, it is safe to say that this idea could definitely “fly” and be on Amazon’s radar soon.