Abstract
The use of mobile nodes to collect data in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has gained special attention over the last years. Some researchers explore the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as mobile node for such data-collection purposes. Analyzing these works, it is apparent that mobile nodes used in such scenarios are typically equipped with at least two different radio interfaces. The present work presents a Dual-Stack Single-Radio Communication Architecture (DSSRCA), which allows a UAV to communicate in a bidirectional manner with a WSN and a Sink node. The proposed architecture was specifically designed to support different network QoS requirements, such as best-effort and more reliable communications, attending both UAV-to-WSN and UAV-to-Sink communications needs. DSSRCA was implemented and tested on a real UAV, as detailed in this paper. This paper also includes a simulation analysis that addresses bandwidth consumption in an environmental monitoring application scenario. It includes an analysis of the data gathering rate that can be achieved considering different UAV flight speeds. Obtained results show the viability of using a single radio transmitter for collecting data from the WSN and forwarding such data to the Sink node.
Highlights
Over the last 15 years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been studied extensively and applied in a large number of real world applications, ranging from environment monitoring, to event detection and target tracking
– Approaches using a single radio in the mobile data collector only perform data collection, i.e., the mobile node does not communicate with the sink node while on the quest for data collection
Our work is different in the way that it focuses on using a dual stack that allows a mobile node, in our case a Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), with deterministic mobility patterns, to collect data from heterogeneous ground sensor nodes and send telemetry or collected data back to the Sink node using the same communication hardware and without compromising the data collection rate
Summary
Over the last 15 years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been studied extensively and applied in a large number of real world applications, ranging from environment monitoring (e.g., pollution, agriculture, volcanoes, structures and buildings health), to event detection (e.g., intrusions, fire and flood emergencies) and target tracking (e.g., surveillance). We detail the Dual-Stack Single-Radio Communication Architecture (DSSRCA), which was first presented in [15]. DSSRCA allows a mobile node (e.g., a UAV) to communicate in a bidirectional manner with a WSN and a Sink node using the same radio. This architecture is composed of a dual stack protocol designed to meet the different network QoS requirements present in UAV-to-WSN and UAV-to-Sink communications, such as best-effort and more reliable communication.
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