Radio Diversity for Heterogeneous Communication with Wireless Sensors
Yuan Qin, David Edward Boyle, Eric M. Yeatman · 2019
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) deployed in tandem with wireless sensor networks (WSN) are increasingly considered for remote sensing applications. To date, most reported implementations continue to rely on communication protocols designed for static WSN that often require synchronization. Synchronous protocols, such as ZigBee, have long association times before the nodes synchronize, which compromises performance for aerial data collection. Asynchronous protocols based on the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer tailored for mobile WSN data collection have been proposed. However, low over the air bit rates limit the amount of sensing data transferred for each UAV visit. To obtain a higher bit rate, we have developed a dynamic protocol capable of switching between physical layers of IEEE 802.15.4 (IEEE mode) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE mode), which works as an extension of UAV Integrated WSN Protocol (UIWP). The BLE mode fits into the UIWP Data State which manages burst transmissions of data. BLE mode is implemented at a low cost in terms of RAM and ROM usage, which are several hundreds of bytes respectively. Experimental evaluation results show that BLE mode consumes 54% of time and 57% of energy for transmitting the same amount of data compared with IEEE mode.