Design and experiment of a WSN sink platform based on fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

To satisfy the increasing demand of wireless sensor network (WSN) distribution in the different monitoring area and enlarge the coverage of the WSNs in various scenes of application, in this paper, we constructed a new type of mobile wireless data sinking platform for collecting the data of WSN based on the technology of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). First, the authors studied a wireless environmental monitoring system containing the UAV platform and WSN is constructed and both test on wireless communication capacity and data collecting are carried out. The communication capacity test show that when the RF modules are operated with transmission power greater than 1 dBm and communication distance less than 100 m, the UAV wireless sink node can maintain a high quality communication data link which has a lower PLR (less than the 5 %) and better signal level (RSSI greater than −90 dBm) with transmission data rate of 250 kbps, using this RF transceiver a simple communication & data collection protocol between UAV and ground WSN sink node was proposed. The whole work of this paper should provide some experience for building a UAV cooperative WSN system in the future.