Exploiting an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Energy Efficient Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, an energy efficient data collection algorithm is proposed for Wireless Sensors Networks employing a single Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV-WSNs). In the system, since the position and the data amount of sensors are stochastic, the UAV as a relay scans the area along a fixed path to collect the data of all sensors. Energy saving is the main challenge to prolong the life time of the sensors. The main research of this paper is to reduce the energy consumption of all sensors by jointly optimizing the flight trajectory of UAV, the time schedule and the power of the sensor to transmit data. The original problem can be formulated as a non-convex and mixed-integer optimization problem. According to the number of sensors in the communication area of the UAV, we studied the problem by dividing it into a single sensor and multiple sensors case. Moreover, the successive convex optimization techniques and differential evolution algorithm are applied to solve the problem. Finally, we performed extensive simulations to compare our proposed algorithms with benchmark algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is better than the benchmark algorithm.