UAV-assisted Cluster-head Selection Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is gaining popularity in many applications, i.e. data collection, surveillance, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) etc. In the WSN domain, the UAVs are used to create a more flexible data-gathering platform. This integration maximizes the lifetime of a WSN by optimizing the energy budget. In this paper, we have utilized these benefits of UAVs and have proposed an optimum cluster head (CH) selection strategy to maximize the lifetime of WSNs. The proposed method uses the average residual energy, the channel condition and the Euclidean distance of each sensor node (SN) with a UAV to nominate a group of CHs. Based on the initial analytical analysis, the proposed scheme maximizes the lifetime of a WSN by a fair amount in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods.