Dynamic Rendezvous Node Estimation for Reliable Data Collection of a Drone as a Mobile IoT Gateway

By using drones as mobile IoT gateways in wireless sensor networks, data collection can be possible even in areas where IoT wireless communication is not available. A drone can move near the rendezvous node of the wireless sensor networks and receive the collected data from the node. Then, the drone moves to an area where IoT wireless communication is possible and transfers the data to the IoT server. Because drones operate as a battery, it is important to optimize the energy consumption. Existing research reduces the drones energy consumption by minimizing flight distance using predetermined information such as the orbit, sensor location and network topology. However, if data collection fails, the additional flying distance of the drone increases dramatically and energy consumption also increases. It is important to increase the success rate of data collection. In this paper, we propose a dynamic rendezvous node estimation scheme, taking into account the average of drone speed and data collection latency without predetermined information. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is more reliable in terms of the data collection success rate.