Performance Analysis of UAVs Assisted Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Network

• Published in: 2018 IEEE 87th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring) pp. 1 - 5
• Main Authors: Liu, Shuhang, Wei, Zhiqing, Guo, Zijun, Yuan, Xin, Feng, Zhiyong
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2018
• Subjects: Capacitive sensors; Data collection; Resource management; Simulation; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 2577-2465
• DOI: 10.1109/VTCSpring.2018.8417673

In the Internet of Things (IoT) services, the data of wireless sensor network needs to be collected. However, in the scenarios that have no infrastructure support, the data collection of sensors has great difficulty. Since unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has the characteristics of flexibility, it can be applied in the data collection for wireless sensor network (WSN). In this paper, we study UAVs supported data collection for WSN. Firstly, the entire region is divided into multiple cells. Secondly, the flight paths for single UAV and multiple UAVs are designed to cover all cells. The per-node capacity of sensor is derived, which is a function of the number of cells, the height of UAV, the number of sensors and the energy capacity of UAV. It is found that the per- node capacity with multiple UAVs is much larger than that with single UAVs. Then the optimal number of cells is derived to maximize the per-node capacity of WSN. Finally, we provide simulation results to verify our analysis. The discoveries in this paper may provide guideline for the UAVs assisted data collection in WSN.