Abstract
Recognizing that data collection in a unmanned aerial vehicle–wireless sensor network system is significantly different from that in a conventional wireless sensor network system, we propose a media access control protocol called adaptive-opportunistic Aloha for unmanned aerial vehicle–wireless sensor network systems. Based on a cross-layered design, this proposed adaptive-opportunistic Aloha protocol takes several important factors into consideration, including distribution of sensors, energy consumption, and transmission efficiency. In order for unmanned aerial vehicle to uniformly collect data from the ground sensors that are distributed in a random fashion, adaptive-opportunistic Aloha adopts a priority-based mechanism for channel assignment and collision avoidance, and importantly, the priority could be adaptively changed according to locations and distribution of the sensors. To improve energy efficiency, the adaptive-opportunistic Aloha can effectively put the sensors into the sleep mode when they do not need to send data, and they will be woken up by a beacon signal from the unmanned aerial vehicle for data transmission. Unlike opportunistic Aloha protocol, a well-known unmanned aerial vehicle–wireless sensor network media access control protocol, the adaptive-opportunistic Aloha adds a handshake into every time interval of transmission to help enhance the throughput with an acceptable level of system bit error rate. Experiment results have shown that the proposed media access control protocol can improve the overall throughput of unmanned aerial vehicle–wireless sensor network systems by more than 30% over opportunistic Aloha.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, various types of wireless sensor network (WSN) systems have been proposed and successfully deployed in a slew of application areas spanning military, medical, environmental, and other businesses
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks continued technology breakthroughs in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), there is a growing popularity that UAVs act as the mobile nodes in collaboration with the ground WSNs
In Ho et al.,7,23 a code division multiple access (CDMA)-based medium access control (MAC) protocol is dedicated for WSNUAV systems
Summary
Over the last two decades, various types of wireless sensor network (WSN) systems have been proposed and successfully deployed in a slew of application areas spanning military, medical, environmental, and other businesses. In Ho et al., a code division multiple access (CDMA)-based MAC protocol is dedicated for WSNUAV systems As this scheme only allows a limited number of active sensors to transmit their data at a given time, the total amount of time to complete data collection tends to be quite large, and there is no guarantee that each sensor will have an opportunity to send its data to the UAV even after all the transmission time windows have expired. Another big problem of this CDMA-based MAC and all the other aforementioned protocols is that they fail to deliver the uniformity of data collection.
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