Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In an IoT world sensor-enabled systems are all around us and accessible for management at any time and place. Besides other technological components, small unmanned aerial vehicles are also expected to have an important role in IoT as they fly at low-altitude becoming suitable data acquisition vehicles in certain situations. In this article we focus on data gathering using unmanned aerial vehicles for applications having delivery limit constraints. The problem is to design an efficient set of paths to gather sensor data at specific places, and to deliver it at the sink node, while accomplishing the delivery limit associated with data. After formalizing the problem, a heuristic approach is developed that incorporates solution improvement mechanisms suitable for data gathering purposes. Results show that the proposed approach is suitable to solve the data gathering problem and clues on how to adjust parameters, according to the nature of the data set, are given.