Age of Multi-Source Information Minimization for UAV-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper explores an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless sensor network (WSN), where one UAV-enabled mobile data collector periodically collects data from a set of ground sensor nodes (SNs) to the data center (DC), intending to fulfill the users’ diverse needs. To accurately evaluate information freshness, we introduce the Age of Multi-Source Information (AomsI) metric. Under this framework, we formulate the optimization problem aiming to minimize the average AomsI for all users. To tackle this non-convex problem, we decompose it into two sub-problems: the SN-side optimization problem and the UAV-side optimization problem. For the first subproblem, we propose the parallel optimization method to obtain the optimal solution. For the second subproblem, we first determine the optimal UAV transmission power, and then propose the task-associated genetic algorithm (TAGA) to design the UAV’s visiting order. Simulation results demonstrate that the UAV tends to prioritize the collection of all SN data required by the same user during data collection.