| Low-cost and high-performance Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) wireless equipment, such as IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN ("Wi-Fi"), has so advanced that it is now practical to use it in small low-altitude Un-manned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This new capability has inspired many novel application ideas in UAV networking. We argue that field experimentation of UAV networking is essential in collecting link meas-urement data, developing network protocols and ap-plications, and evaluating their performance in realis-tic environments, and that it is feasible to conduct these experiments cost-effectively with COTS-based equipment. We describe a couple of ongoing field ex-periments and initial results. Lastly, we suggest meth-ods of facilitating rapid and inexpensive UAV net-working field experimentation. |