Abstract
Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) attracted significant popularity in both military and civilian domains for various applications and services. Moreover, UAV-aided wireless sensor networks (UAWSNs) became one of the interesting hot research topics. This is mainly because UAWSNs can significantly increase the network coverage and energy utilization compared to traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the high mobility, dynamic path, and variable altitude of UAVs can cause not only unforeseen changes in the network topology but also connectivity and coverage problems, which can affect the routing performance of the network. Therefore, the design of a routing protocol for UAWSNs is a critical task. In this paper, the routing protocols for UAWSNs are extensively investigated and discussed. Firstly, we classify the existing routing protocols based on different network criteria. They are extensively reviewed and compared with each other in terms of advantages and limitation, routing metrics and policies, characteristics, difference performance factors, and different performance optimization factors. Furthermore, open research issues and challenges are summarized and discussed.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks emerged and became popular
In unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) networks, IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocols are widely used for the communications between UAV and the ground station because they are suitable for long-range communication and can handle higher bandwidth with high data rate
Hybrid UAV-aided wireless sensor networks (WSNs) routing (H-UAV-WSN): When a WSN is formed with thousands of sensor nodes and a traditional immobile sink node, this may result in inefficient area coverage and decreased network performance
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks emerged and became popular. Due to the rapid deployment and flexibility of UAV devices, UAV networks are being considered as future wireless communication systems. UAWSNs are wireless sensor networks with a UAV sink, where a UAV is used to collect data from ground sensor nodes. UAWSNs are effectively applied to some geographical scenarios, such as remote, harsh, and isolated areas [13], as well as to data collection from sensors [14], data relay [15,16], and UAV-aided wireless communications [17,18]. Because of the limited battery capacity and high power consumption of UAVs, an energy-efficient routing protocol for UAWSNs is necessarily required both in military domains and in commercial applications. The deployment and the trajectory planning of UAV significantly influence the routing protocol performance [20]
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