Energy Efficient Data Collection for Wireless Sensors Using Drones

This paper proposes an energy-efficient solution to employ a drone to gather data from spatially distributed wireless sensors. Specifically, we minimize the energy consumption of the drone while accomplishing a tour to collect the needed data. This tour accounts for both the energies due to data transfer and to the motion of the drone. The objective is to determine the positions where the drone stops to collect data from each cluster of sensors as well as the path that the drone needs to follow to complete its data gathering tour. The problem is decomposed into two sub-problems. The first sub-problem targets to determine the sub-groups of sensors and stop positions to collect data from each sub- group using a clustering approach. In the second sub- problem, we employ the travel salesman solution to find the path among these stops Selected numerical results show that the achieved energy is considerably reduced compared to the one of traditional approaches. Moreover, we study the behavior of the drone versus various system parameters.