Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) can be effectively used for time-critical sensing applications. UAVs can be used to collect the sensed data from sensors and transfer them to a base station. The real-time transfer of data is highly desired in the time-critical applications. However, the medium access control (MAC) protocols designed for UWSNs so far are primarily focused on the efficient use of UAVs to collect data in the sensing areas. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and fast MAC (EF-MAC) protocol in UWSNs for time-critical sensing applications. EF-MAC adopts carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) for the registration of sensor nodes with a UAV and time division multiple access (TDMA) with variable slot time for the transmission of collected data. The UAV is equipped with two transceivers to minimize both energy consumption and delay in air-to-ground communication. The energy consumption and delay are formally analyzed and the performance of EF-MAC is evaluated via extensive simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed EF-MAC outperforms the conventional MAC protocols in terms of energy efficiency and communication delay.
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become popular in a wide range of applications aimed at the modernization and betterment of our society [1,2]
We assume that cluster head (CH) will contend the channel only if they have some data to transfer to the Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) otherwise, they will sleep until active period to save the energy
We consider a UAV-aided WSN (UWSN) consisting of N sensors within an area of interest A, where a UAV is employed as a mobile data collector to gather information from n cluster heads (CHs) on the ground
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become popular in a wide range of applications aimed at the modernization and betterment of our society [1,2]. In UWSNs, UAVs can be effectively utilized for several different purposes such as deployment of sensor nodes [16], extension of communication range [17], and wireless power transfer in WSNs [18], data gathering from ground sensor nodes [19], maintaining connectivity [20], and localization of sensor nodes [21]. Existing MAC protocols designed for WSNs or UAVs do not perform well in UWSNs because of the high mobility of UAVs and the limited contact time between UAVs and sensor nodes. UWSNs and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the MAC protocols utilized in VANETs are unsuitable for UWSNs owing to the densely employed sensor nodes, which results in collisions while communicating with UAVs. Due to the rapid mobility of UAVs, the dynamic change of network topology, and the constraints of operation time and energy in UWSNs, designing an efficient MAC protocol that addresses abovementioned issues is a challenging task.
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