Cooperative Path Selection Framework for Effective Data Gathering in UAV-Aided Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are often used to understand underlying phenomena that are reflected through sensing data. In real world applications, this understanding supports decision makers attempting to access a disaster area or monitor a certain event regularly and thus necessary actions can be triggered in response to the problems. Practitioners designing such systems must overcome difficulties due to the practical limitations of the data and the fidelity of a network condition. This paper explores the design of a network solution for the data acquisition domain with the goal of increasing the efficiency of data gathering efforts. An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is introduced to address various real-world sensor network challenges such as limited resources, lack of real-time representative data, and mobility of a relay station. Towards this goal, we introduce a novel cooperative path selection framework to effectively collect data from multiple sensor sources. The framework consists of six main parts ranging from the system initialization to the UAV data acquisition. The UAV data acquisition is useful to increase situational awareness or used as inputs for data manipulation that support response efforts. We develop a system-based simulation that creates the representative sensor networks and uses the UAV for collecting data packets. Results using our proposed framework are analyzed and compared to existing approaches to show the efficiency of the scheme.