Age-Based Path Planning and Data Acquisition in UAV-Assisted IoT Networks

To support emerging networked monitoring and data analytics applications, timely delivery of fresh information is of critical importance for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted data collection in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Age of information (AoI) is proposed as a performance metric to measure the data freshness at destination since the sampling at data source. In this paper, we employ the concept of age to study a UAV path planning and data acquisition problem by jointly considering the data acquisition mode selection, energy consumption at each node, and age evolution of collected information. To solve the formulated problem, we propose a solution framework based on dynamic programming approach. Through simulation results, we show that the performance of our proposed solution is competitive when compared with traditional flight time-optimal strategy.