Data collection in wireless sensor networks using UAV and compressive data gathering

Abstract

Fifth generation wireless networks are expected to provide advanced capabilities and create new markets spanning a wide range of use cases. Among these, massive IoT is standing out with the proliferation of sensors and wearable devices that continuously monitor and transmit data for further processing. This paper proposes a novel data collection technique using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in dense wireless sensor networks (WSNs) using projection-based Compressive Data Gathering (CDG) as a solution methodology. CDG is utilized to aggregate data en route from sets of sensor nodes to a set of projection nodes (heads) in order to notably reduce the number of transmissions leading to energy savings and extended WSN lifetime. The UAVs forward the gathered data from heads to a remote sink to enhance efficiency by avoiding long range transmissions from heads to the sink or multi-hop communications among sensors to the sink. We formulate a joint optimization problem that captures clustering, heads selection, routing trees construction, and UAV trajectory planning. In order to overcome the complexity of the joint optimization problem, we decompose the problem into separate parts and propose a heuristic to solve each subproblem for large-scale network scenarios.