UAV Aided Data Collection for Wildlife Monitoring using Cache-enabled Mobile Ad-hoc Wireless Sensor Nodes

Umair B Chaudhry,Chris I Phillips

doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2021.0121002

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted data collection is not a new concept and has been used in various mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a caching assisted scheme alternative to routing in MANETs for the purpose of wildlife monitoring. Rather than deploying a routing protocol, data is collected and transported to and from a base station using a UAV. Although some literature exists on such an approach, we propose the use of intermediate caching between the mobile nodes and compare it to a baseline scenario where no caching is used. The paper puts forward our communication design where we have simulated the movement of multiple mobile sensor nodes in a field that move according to the Levy walk model imitating wildlife animal foraging and a UAV that makes regular trips across the field to collect data from them. The unmanned aerial vehicle can collect data not only from the current node it is communicating with but also data of other nodes that this node came into contact with. Simulations show that exchanging cached data is highly advantages as the drone can indirectly communicate with many more mobile nodes.

Highlights

The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) in various areas such as environmental monitoring, military, vehicular networks and animal tracking has been widely adopted [1]–[6]
Another thing to notice here is that the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was allowed only one trip across the field in our experimentations we predict that we can further see a significant increase in the nodes seen percentage provided that the UAV makes more than one trips to collect data from the sensor nodes
The trip timings may play a reasonable role in the percentage of nodes encountered by the UAV as we did notice in some cases that the number of nodes cached at the sensor nodes and the waypoints were higher than the nodes encountered by the UAV

Summary

Introduction

The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) in various areas such as environmental monitoring, military, vehicular networks and animal tracking has been widely adopted [1]–[6]. Applications of such networks vary based on the targeted area. In MANETs, nodes are mobile forming temporary networks throughout their runtime. Nodes in these networks are typically small and possess limited resources. They have restricted processing power and run on small batteries energy conservation is a serious concern for them. We propose the use of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to periodically to collect data from caching assisted nodes, avoiding routing altogether

Objectives

Results

Conclusion