Edge Computing in IoT Ecosystems for UAV-Enabled Early Fire Detection

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) facilitate the development of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems for smart city and smart environment applications. This paper proposes the adoption of Edge and Fog computing principles to the UAV based forest fire detection application domain through a hierarchical architecture. This three-layer ecosystem combines the powerful resources of cloud computing, the rich resources of fog computing and the sensing capabilities of the UAVs. These layers efficiently cooperate to address the key challenges imposed by the early forest fire detection use case. Initial experimental evaluations measuring crucial performance metrics indicate that critical resources, such as CPU/RAM, battery life and network resources, can be efficiently managed and dynamically allocated by the proposed approach.