Age‐optimal path planning for finite‐battery UAV‐assisted data dissemination in IoT networks

Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles have been widely used to assist wireless sensor networks due to ever‐increasing demands for Internet‐of‐things applications. To support timely delivery of information characterised by a recently introduced metric, termed as the age of information, this paper explore...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Abolfazl Changizi, Mohammad Javad Emadi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2021-06-01
Series:IET Communications
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1049/cmu2.12105
Description
Summary:Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles have been widely used to assist wireless sensor networks due to ever‐increasing demands for Internet‐of‐things applications. To support timely delivery of information characterised by a recently introduced metric, termed as the age of information, this paper explores freshness of data in an unmanned aerial vehicle assisted wireless sensor network. Specifically, the authors consider a limited‐energy unmanned aerial vehicle moving towards the Internet‐of‐things devices to disseminate data packets provided by a data centre. Since the unmanned aerial vehicle cannot visit all the nodes in each flight turn due to its finite‐sized battery, the best sequence of nodes, from an age of information perspective, should be selected at the beginning of each flight turn. Thus, an unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory planning for data dissemination is proposed taking into account both maximal use of energy and freshness of data. To minimise the weighted sum age of information metric, by utilising the well‐known knapsack and travelling salesman problems, the authors propose an algorithm to efficiently select devices and the corresponding visiting order in each flight turn. Finally, to highlight performance of the proposed algorithm, and to investigate the effect of limited‐energy unmanned aerial vehicles, the number of nodes and flight turns, and simulation results are also provided and compared with other benchmark algorithms.
ISSN:1751-8628
1751-8636