Performance Evaluation of 802.11 IoT Devices for Data Collection in the Forest with Drones

IoT solutions, in order to reduce power consumption, assume severe constraints on the transmission rate, which limit their use to applications with small amounts of collected data per device. Thus, these solutions are not suitable for monitoring wild animals, which requires transmitting large amounts of photos captured by cameras, installed in the middle of the forest. In addition, the forest environment also impairs the transmission capacity. Therefore, this work proposes collecting data from devices in the forest with the aid of unmanned aerial vehicles - drones. Hence, this paper aims at evaluating the performance of a wireless network between the device attached to the drone and the cameras. To achieve our goal, we evaluate traditional network metrics, such as maximum range, transmission rate, and packet loss. To compare and better characterize the transmission in the forest, we also assess the performance of those devices in different scenarios: indoor, outdoor, and inside the forest. The most important result is the feasibility of using low-complexity IoT devices for collection large amounts of data in forest applications.