Modeling of a UAV-based data collection system

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively studied the past years for various applications. In this work, we propose a Markov chain to model the movement of a single UAV deployed for data collection from remote sensors. Furthermore, we introduce a second Markov chain to model the irregularities of the UAV's movement when it is in transit. We investigate the impact of the distance of the UAV from the sensor on the success probability of information transmission. We provide numerical evaluation of the theoretical results.