Minimizing Data Collection Time With Collaborative UAVs in Wireless Sensor Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data collection is a promising research direction that can be applied to many practical scenarios. Due to the limited energy of sensors in wireless sensor networks (WSN), UAV, which is considered as a mobile fusion center, can effectively prolong the lifetime of sensor via supporting communication with the sensor directly. However, since the UAV's energy constrained, it is necessary that multiple UAVs provide data collection to sensors in large areas. In this paper, we consider a scenario where multiple UAVs collect data from a set of two-dimensional distributed sensors. The UAV can communicate with sensors while flying or hovering. The goal is to minimize the total time that all UAVs from data center and return to data center after completing all collection tasks, while giving each sensor a certain amount of data and energy. The problem of minimizing the task completion time of multiple UAVs is still a big challenge. We solve the multi-UAV problem by jointly optimizing UAV-sensor association mechanism and data collection method of UAVs. The numerical results show that the proposed multi-UAV data collection scheme shortens the task completion time.