Uav-assisted data collection in wireless sensor networks: A comprehensive survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed to different areas of interest to sense phenomena, process sensed data, and take actions accordingly. The networks are integrated with many advanced technologies to be able to fulfill their tasks that is becoming more and more complicated. These networks tend to connect to multimedia networks and to process huge data over long distances. Due to the limited resources of static sensor nodes, WSNs need to cooperate with mobile robots such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in their developments. The mobile devices show their maneuverability, computational and energystorage abilities to support WSNs in multimedia networks. This paper addresses a comprehensive survey of almost scenarios utilizing UAVs and UGVs with strogly emphasising on UAVs for data collection in WSNs. Either UGVs or UAVs can collect data from static sensor nodes in the monitoring fields. UAVs can either work alone to collect data or can cooperate with other UAVs to increase their coverage in their working fields. Different techniques to support the UAVs are addressed in this survey. Communication links, control algorithms, network structures and different mechanisms are provided and compared. Energy consumption or transportation cost for such scenarios are considered. Opening issues and challenges are provided and suggested for the future developments

Crowd-based positioning of UAVs as Access Points

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be a cost saving and easy to deploy solution to implement a temporary network infrastructure. They can act as access points in scenarios such as emergency situations, special events, or specific area monitoring. Two main deployment families can be found in the literature. The first one, the location-based family, is based on the fundamental assumption that the network user positions are known. We do believe that this could not suit the most general scenarios. On the other hand, the location-independent family can not be as efficient as the first one. The main idea in this paper is to introduce a new crowd-based family, based on a probabilistic knowledge of user positions. We then propose a self-deployment method built on a Coulomb's law analogy where users and UAVs act as electrical charges. Short range interactions are implemented through network sensing, while long range ones use a crowd-based approach. Some numerical results are depicted, showing the performance of this self-deploying mechanism as well as a comparison with a well-known clustering algorithm

Optimizing communication and computation for multi-UAV information gathering applications

Typical mobile agent networks, such as multi-UAV systems, are constrained by limited resources: energy, computing power, memory and communication bandwidth. In particular, limited energy affects system performance directly, such as system lifetime. Moreover, it has been demonstrated experimentally in the wireless sensor network literature that the total energy consumption is often dominated by the communication cost, i.e. the computational and the sensing energy are small compared to the communication energy consumption. For this reason, the lifetime of the network can be extended significantly by minimizing the communication distance as well as the amount of communication data, at the expense of increasing computational cost. In this work, we aim at attaining an optimal trade-off between the communication and the computational energy. Specifically, we propose a mixed-integer optimization formulation for a multihop hierarchical clustering-based self-organizing UAV network incorporating data aggregation, to obtain an energy-efficient information routing scheme. The proposed framework is tested on two applications, namely target tracking and area mapping. Based on simulation results, our method can significantly save energy compared to a baseline strategy, where there is no data aggregation and clustering scheme

Optimal UAV Deployment for Data Collection in Deadline-based IoT Applications

The deployment of UAVs is one of the key challenges in UAV-based communications while using UAVs for IoT applications. In this article, a new scheme for energy efficient data collection with a deadline time for the Internet of things (IoT) using the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is presented. We provided a new data collection method, which was set to collect IoT node data by providing an efficient deployment and mobility of multiple UAV, used to collect data from ground internet of things devices in a given deadline time. In the proposed method, data collection was done with minimum energy consumption of IoTs as well as UAVs. In order to find an optimal solution to this problem, we will first provide a mixed integer linear programming model (MILP) and then we used a heuristic to solve the time complexity problem. The results obtained in the simulation results indicate the optimal performance of the proposed scheme in terms of energy consumption and the number of used UAVs

Architecture and Methods for Innovative Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Nowadays wireless sensor netwoks (WSN) technology, wireless communications and digital electronics have made it realistic to produce a large scale miniaturized devices integrating sensing, processing and communication capabilities. The focus of this paper is to present an innovative mobile platform for heterogeneous sensor networks, combined with adaptive methods to optimize the communication architecture for novel potential applications in multimedia and entertainment. In fact, in the near future, some of the applications foreseen for WSNs will employ multi-platform systems with a high number of different devices, which may be completely different in nature, size, computational and energy capabilities, etc. Nowadays, in addition, data collection could be performed by UAV platforms which can be a sink for ground sensors layer, acting essentially as a mobile gateway. In order to maximize the system performances and the network lifespan, the authors propose a recently developed hybrid technique based on evolutionary algorithms. The goal of this procedure is to optimize the communication energy consumption in WSN by selecting the optimal multi-hop routing schemes, with a suitable hybridization of different routing criteria. The proposed approach can be potentially extended and applied to ongoing research projects focused on UAV-based sensing with WSN augmentation and real-time processing for immersive media experiences

Resources Efficient Dynamic Clustering Algorithm for Flying Ad-Hoc Network

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, often known as UAVs, are connected in the form of a Flying Ad-hoc Network, or FANET, and placed to use in a variety of applications to carry out efficient remote monitoring. Their great mobility has an adverse effect on their energy consumption, which in turn has a detrimental effect on the network's stability and the effectiveness of communication. To manage the very dynamic flying behavior of UAVs and to keep the network stable, novel clustering algorithms have been implemented. In this context, a novel clustering technique is developed to meet the rapid mobility of UAVs and to offer safe inter-UAV distance, reliable communication, and an extended network lifespan. It also provides a detailed analysis of the similarities and distinctions between AODV, AOMDV, DSDV, and DumbAgent.The performance of these protocols is analyzed using the NS-2 simulator. The simulation results are shown in our study with AODV, AOMDV, DSDV, and DumbAgent. The results of the simulation make it abundantly evident that the AODV routing protocol outperforms the other routing protocols DSDV, AOMDV, and DumbAgent in terms of the number of packets lost, the amount of throughput achieved, the amount of routing overhead generated, and the amount of delay

Cooperative relay selection for load balancing with mobility in hierarchical WSNs: A multi-armed bandit approach

© 2013 IEEE. Energy efficiency is the major concern in hierarchical wireless sensor networks(WSNs), where the major energy consumption originates from radios for communication. Due to notable energy expenditure of long-range transmission for cluster members and data aggregation for Cluster Head (CH), saving and balancing energy consumption is a tricky challenge in WSNs. In this paper, we design a CH selection mechanism with a mobile sink (MS) while proposing relay selection algorithms with multi-user multi-armed bandit (UM-MAB) to solve the problem of energy efficiency. According to the definition of node density and residual energy, we propose a conception referred to as a Virtual Head (VH) for MS to collect data in terms of energy efficiency. Moreover, we naturally change the relay selection problem into permutation problem through employing the two-hop transmission in cooperative power line communication, which deals with long-distance transmission. As far as the relay selection problem is concerned, we propose the machine learning algorithm, namely MU-MAB, to solve it through the reward associated with an increment for energy consumption. Furthermore, we employ the stable matching theory based on marginal utility for the allocation of the final one-to-one optimal combinations to achieve energy efficiency. In order to evaluate MU-MAB, the regret is taken advantage to demonstrate the performance by using upper confidence bound (UCB) index. In the end, simulation results illustrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed solutions for saving and balancing energy consumption