Poster: Communicating "in the Air": Studying the Impact of UAVs on Sensor Network Data Collection

The commercialization of cheap unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is starting to change the way we, as sensor network system designers, think of data collection. Especially, UAVs provide a third dimension of mobile data collection as we can now traverse the sky with minimal obstacles, rather than rovering the ground with wheeled robots. However, despite UAVs or drones being an interesting platform with the potential to change sensor network deployment topologies, little do we understand on how data collection will perform "in the air". In this work we present a preliminary empirical study on the performance of aerial data collection using an IEEE 802.15.4 radio-equipped drone connecting itself to sensor nodes positioned on the ground. Our results show that a drone-based data collection platform outperforms that of an "at ground-level" data collection unit, despite being at identical distances. Based on this study, we identify the increased data collection height and "easy-to-achieve" line-of-sight as key features that make this possible.