Partnership and data forwarding model for data acquisition in UAV-aided sensor networks

This paper explores a cooperative partnership and data forwarding model in wireless sensor networks using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with the goal of enhancing the data collection efforts. A UAV-based data acquisition architecture is presented to suppress the limitations of the traditional wireless sensor network. For this, we introduce a flexible and fast approach to collect data by taking into consideration the mobility of the mobile sink (UAV) and sensor nodes in the network. In other words, leveraging the mobility of the UAV and the location of sensor nodes, we adopt a novel frame selection technique that classifies sensor nodes into different frames. Then we present a cooperative partnership model that allows sensor nodes in the network to individually pair with their peers and thus transmitting data simultaneously. We also aim to alleviate the packet loss originated from certain sensor nodes located in the rear edge-side of the UAV's coverage area. This situation happens when the UAV is moving in the forward direction while collecting data. Thus, to alleviate these packet losses while guaranteeing a higher success rate of packet reception ratio, we propose a novel data forwarding scheme to closely integrate with the aforementioned partnership model. We conduct simulations to verify our proposed framework, and results show huge performance gain is obtained over the traditional data collection technique.