You are forgetting that the user of the drone can set the transmission protocol beforehand, and thus is still an important part of the process.
Given that you have a channel between A and B and an eavesdropper C:
Transmission between A and B can be done by any of several obfuscatory protocols, where (for example) a certain flag sent by A tells B to ignore some component of the transmission, to do no error correction on that part, etc. That flag is sent when updates are sparse, and filler (which is to be ignored) is added by B. Without determining how to identify between filler and data, C sees no variations in traffic volume.
Overcoming real-time spikes is easy with this protocol. Just keep a buffer of a few seconds before you begin transmitting.
This approach is a common answer to any sort of traffic analysis. There's actually a Tor alternative that operates on this principle of constant traffic between nodes (traffic analysis is an effective attack versus Tor), but the name escapes me at the moment.
Given that you have a channel between A and B and an eavesdropper C:
Transmission between A and B can be done by any of several obfuscatory protocols, where (for example) a certain flag sent by A tells B to ignore some component of the transmission, to do no error correction on that part, etc. That flag is sent when updates are sparse, and filler (which is to be ignored) is added by B. Without determining how to identify between filler and data, C sees no variations in traffic volume.
Overcoming real-time spikes is easy with this protocol. Just keep a buffer of a few seconds before you begin transmitting.
This approach is a common answer to any sort of traffic analysis. There's actually a Tor alternative that operates on this principle of constant traffic between nodes (traffic analysis is an effective attack versus Tor), but the name escapes me at the moment.