Beyond 5G Satellite Transmission and Indoor UAVs in Dams Monitoring: An Opportunistic Data Collection Strategy for Isolated Rural Areas

In isolated rural areas, the absence of communication infrastructures hamper the maintenance of critical infrastructure by local governments. Hydraulic structures require periodic auscultation to monitor health indicators and identify hazards for rural communities such as floods. However, limited Internet within dam galleries lead to extensive manual inspections, which may lead to errors and late emergency detection. Considering this, this work proposes an autonomous communication architecture based on self-driven indoor Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for opportunistic data collection from sensors in dam galleries. Once collected, UAVs transmit the measurements to a low-Earth orbit satellite via Beyond 5G, which performs prompt data analysis using machine learning to detect anomalies and notify emergencies. To assess the viability, a testbed evaluates the quality of service of opportunistic communications. As a result, the obtained values indicate a positive performance, achieving a 100% delivery probability and suitable average latency values.