More and more communication on UAV become important, not only between the UAV and the GCS, also between UAV and UAV. A nice way for communication between systems is IP based internet technology. This will also be increased on UAS. To use internet based communication has also some benefits regarding externalized computer power within a cloud for instance.

But most of the communication these days is very specialized for known combinations of UAV, UAV and GCS. Therefore it would be very nice to have some kind of standard for communication between these systems. In the world of IoT usually a broker is used for this. One of these systems is MQTT and for none-IP-based approaches MQTT-SN. Dronedeploy.com seems to use ZeroMQ, but for me it seems that MQTT is a more popular system.

I started an opensource project which uses MQTT combined with JSON to communicate between a GCS and an Android smartphone to take some pictures for ground mapping. So this can be a base for developing the topic-structure as well as often used data and their formats, like position and attitude. Also it is language independent and should not be a problem to use it on C, C++, Phyton or Java based systems.

You can find this project here: uasmqtt
I know it's very simple at the moment but it's a kind of proof of concept and discussion base.
The plan is to enhance the Android app with some stuff from my SimpleUAV app.

I really appreciate if other developers are joining the project or contribute ideas to a common UAS communication format. This will also help if there are uav traffic control systems like the one mentioned here.