On Link Performance According to Flight Route in Drone-Based Wide Area Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a system concept of drone based wireless sensor networks where the drone flies to the sensor heads distributed in wide areas and collects the sensing data from them by using short range wireless communications. It also describes link performance according to flight route in the proposed sensor networks. Received signal level at the drone is calculated by using two path model and taking account of the antenna directivity. This paper compares two drone flight route alternatives regarding the outage probability of wireless link between the sensor head and the drone. The evaluated results reveal that the flight route with variable flight height achieves lower outage probability than that with a constant flight height.