Energy Efficient UAV-based Relay System for IoT Networks in Hazardous Industrial Areas

In hazardous industrial environments, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used to relay control messages from the centralized control server to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In our work, we aim at deploying the minimum number of UAVs to send control messages to the maximum number of IoT devices within their deadline while minimizing energy consumption. Our approach will decide on the number of UAVs and their locations as well as the IoT to UAV associations while meeting the control commands’ latency constraints. The problem will be first formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Efficient heuristic solutions for multi-UAV deployment using activity selection algorithm and K-means clustering are then proposed to provide real-time efficient solutions with low time complexity.