'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications are spreading all over around us to become the cardiovascular infrastructure for the data of the cyber-physical systems of the future. The implementation of a reliable collection of telemetry data within various application domains, including medicine, safety, and security, industry, smart cities, or environmental monitoring, to name just a few, is among the major challenges still to be solved. Importantly, many of the use cases imply a huge geographic area span or operation in remote areas with limited infrastructure availability and poor reachability. To address these scenarios in this paper, we propose a combination of the two technologies the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) and the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Specifically, we study the energy utility and the communication performance of introducing a UAV-based GW into an LPWAN based on the LoRaWAN technology. The results of our simulations show that a UAV-based GW enables to reduce the mean energy consumption for communication in the network by up to 59%. Depending on the UAV speed, the communication performance in terms of the packet delivery ratio can either increase or decrease by several percentage points