Geo-fencing Technique in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Post Disaster Management in the Internet of Things

The post disaster situations need data collection and reporting in real time. For effective monitoring, the applications running in such a scenario may require data from specific regions only. This paper addresses the use of unmanned aerial vehicles as IoT devices for data acquisition from different clusters of sensor devices deployed in the region. Three issues are addressed in this paper. First, the disaster region should be isolated from other regions to serve it efficiently using Unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and data acquisition. Second, in certain scenarios, there is a chance of the aerial vehicles getting collided with physical objects like tall trees, buildings etc during the operation because building a physical barrier is near to the disaster place is inconceivable. Third, it should be preferred that aerial vehicle should be operated in the range of visibility and communication such that manual control of the aerial vehicle using remote controller can be carried out without damaging it. Thus, there is a need to have a logical or virtual boundary among the disaster affected regions that separates the working environment in an automated manner. In this view, this paper focuses on the implementation of geo-fencing mechanism in unmanned aerial vehicles during the process of data collection and dissemination of these data further. The proposed approach uses different conditions to demonstrate the effectiveness of geo-fencing technique by using real testbed.