A novel protocol for data links between wireless sensors and UAV based sink nodes
Yuan Qin, David Edward Boyle, Eric M. Yeatman · 2018
Mobile data collection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has the potential to improve device-level energy efficiency and balance network-level energy consumption in comparison with traditional Wireless Sensor Networks. This approach allows new application areas to be explored, particularly in harsh and remote environments, where creating radio links between each device may be impossible, infrastructure networks do not exist, accessibility is limited, etc. Protocols designed for data collection in traditional low power wireless networks have rarely considered the use of mobile data sinks in a practical sense, typically routing data through the network towards a sink or gateway node. In this paper, we describe and evaluate a simple protocol designed specifically for data collection by an aerial mobile sink from static sensing devices. The protocol uses existing ultra-low power physical and asynchronous medium access control mechanisms, and a lightweight application layer for data collection. We evaluate throughput for a number of realistic experimental conditions, including testing performance under contention for access to the medium and in the presence of packet collisions. We show that data collection is reliable in all cases for moderate UAV speeds, and the efficiency of the protocol decreases linearly with increased node density.