Energy-Efficient UAV-Based IoT Communications With WiFi Suppression in 5 GHz ISM Bands

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based communication is a promising technology for offering wireless communication services. UAVs can typically be adopted as aerial base stations to collect data from ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, the Ground-to-Air link of UAV-based IoT communications is prone to be interfered by surrounding WiFi devices in the Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) band. This paper aims to enable reliable uplink communications for IoT devices in 5 GHz ISM bands, thereby reducing the hover time and energy consumption of the UAV. To this end, we first study and design suppression frames suitable for WiFi devices. Then a suppression method is proposed, which is shown to be effective for all the tested devices, based on emulation performance verification of the frames for multiple commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) WiFi devices. Moreover, by taking the energy consumption of the UAV and multiple transmission parameters of the suppression method into account, we formulate an optimization problem for the desired uplink, which is designed to minimize the energy consumption of the UAV, under the constraints of satisfying the link channel capacity. Given that the optimization problem is non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming, this paper proposes an efficient algorithm that takes advantage of the suppression performance of the utilized frames. Numerical simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of the WiFi device density, UAV weight, channel capacity requirement and parameters of the suppression method. The communication quality of the desired Ground-to-Air link is shown to be significantly improved, while the consumed energy is demonstrated to be obviously reduced.