UAV-Based Wide-Area Internet of Things: An Integrated Deployment Architecture

The aerial platform based wide-area Internet of Things (WAIoT) can effectively settle wireless information interactions in emergency scenarios. However, it confronts lots of unprecedented service requirements and technical challenges. To solve these issues, this article establishes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based WAIoT deployment framework by considering three typical scenarios including power outage, massive user connections, and information island relief. Serving as an aerial base station or mobile relay, the UAV provides simultaneous information and energy transfer for IoT users with the consideration of user distribution range, massive user connections, and quality of service (QoS) requirements. For each scenario, the joint UAV deployment and resource allocation scheme is designed to improve the system performance, and some numerical results are presented for validation. This article aims to provide continuous services for users in the emergency scenario through optimizing the aerial platform deployment.