PRISM: Priority-Aware Service Availability in Multi-UAV Networks for IoT Applications

This work sketches a location priority-aware service availability scheme for use in a cellular-enabled multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. These UAVs have the ability to sense the location-based data employing onboard heterogeneous sensors and send the sensed IoT data to the base station (BS). Existing works treat all locations equally and are inefficient in terms of assigning UAVs to provide on-demand location-based IoT services to the users. To address this issue, we formulate the objective as a optimization problem to maximize service availability. As the formulated objective is NP-hard, we propose a scheme named priority-aware service availability for multi-UAV networks (PRISM) to obtain the solution. PRISM operates in two steps. First, it offers a UAV assignment algorithm to prioritize locations and assign the UAVs to the high-priority locations proactively. Next, it employs a service assignment algorithm that assigns the requested location-based IoT services to UAVs. The results of simulation and real experiments depict the efficacy of PRISM in terms of availability and delay of the incoming IoT service requests. From the results, we observe that PRISM improves the average service availability by 20.61% and reduces average service delay by 29.4%, compared to the benchmark solutions.