Internet of Things Data Collection Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Infrastructure Free Environments

Abstract

With the immensity of distributed Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the exponential increase in data generated from a variety of IoT-driven smart-world applications, how to effectively provide data driven service supported by IoT has become a critical issue. While the state-of-the-art technologies have been developed and network infrastructures with high capabilities have been designed to deal with the data collection problem, there are still application scenarios, in which network infrastructure is not available or appropriate in large target areas (e.g., farmlands deployed with IoT sensors in operation, providing precise agriculture; emergency responder with IoT sensors, providing public safety service). To address the issue of efficiently collecting data from IoT devices deployed in large areas without pre-deployed network infrastructure, we formalize the problem space in a three-dimensional model that considers task, resource, and methodology. Based on the designed problem space, we propose a novel solution that deploys an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), as a critical next generation mobile network, to achieve intermittent IoT device connections and enable data collection based on delay tolerant network (DTN) protocol. The UAV flight path is determined using a Hilbert Curve-based path planning algorithm. Through a series of quantitative experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our approach in a network emulation environment, and confirm its advantages in comparison with several baseline approaches. The results of our research shows the capability of quality and cost control in IoT applications such as smart agriculture, public safety disaster recovery and rescue.

Keywords

• Internet of Things
• delay tolerant networks
• next generation mobile networks
• unmanned aerial vehicles
• path planning
• data collection