UAV-assisted data gathering in wireless sensor networks

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a promising carriage for data gathering in wireless sensor networks since it has sufficient as well as efficient resources both in terms of time and energy due to its direct communication between the UAV and sensor nodes. On the other hand, to realize the data gathering system with UAV in wireless sensor networks, there are still some challenging issues remain such that the highly affected problem by the speed of UAVs and network density, also the heavy conflicts if a lot of sensor nodes concurrently send its own data to the UAV. To solve those problems, we propose a new data gathering algorithm, leveraging both the UAV and mobile agents (MAs) to autonomously collect and process data in wireless sensor networks. Specifically, the UAV dispatches MAs to the network and every MA is responsible for collecting and processing the data from sensor nodes in an area of the network by traveling around that area. The UAV gets desired information via MAs with aggregated sensory data. In this paper, we design a itinerary of MA migration with considering the network density. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method is time- and energy-efficient for any density of the network.