Age of Information and Performance Analysis for UAV-Aided IoT Systems

In the Internet of Things (IoT), numerous IoT devices are deployed for environment sensing, information collecting, and data transmitting to enable different operations, including patrol monitor, industrial automation, and system control. Considering the limited power and computation capability of IoT devices, mobile-edge computing (MEC) is applied to enhance the usage of IoT. Since unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used as MEC servers, they become an efficient means to collect data packets and assist computation. In this article, we develop UAV-aided IoT systems, where the performance of data collection is analyzed in terms of packet loss rate and data quantity using a Markov chain. Then, in order to meet the diverse service requirements, the computation frequency of UAV is designed according to the preference coefficients of the cost on energy and time consumption. Finally, the system Age of Information (AoI) is considered to define the freshness of data packets, where the models of single-IoT device and multi-IoT devices with first-come–first-served (FCFS) principle and M/M/1 queuing are analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed system is able to provide robust data collection and efficient computation for IoT devices.