Data Collection in UAV-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks Powered by Harvested Energy

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) assisted-data collection is a new and promising application in many practical scenarios and is gathering a lot of interest. UAVs have the advantage of flexibility as they can be deployed in difficult terrains and hence can be employed for data collection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However UAV assisted-data collection in WSN faces many challenges due especially to energy limitations at both the UAV and the sensors. Hence, in this paper, we adress the data collection problem, by considering wireless power transfer (WPT) from the UAV to the sensor nodes (SNs). Our objective is to minimize the UAV total mission time that is defined as the amount of time needed by the UAV to collect all the data available at the SNs and to replenish their energies. To solve this NP-hard problem, which is formulated as an integer linear program, we propose two heuristics, namely the nearest neighbor algorithm (NNA) and the genetic algorithm (GA). In addition to the optimal solution, we also propose two other simple algorithms as benchmarks, in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms by means of simulations.