Multi-UAV Collaborative Data Collection for IoT Devices Powered by Battery

Due to the limited energy of the Internet of Things (IoT) device, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a mobile fusion center can effectively prolong the lifetime of IoT device via supporting communication with the device directly. Moreover, since UAV’s energy constrained, it will be a good measure to take multiple UAVs to collect data from devices in large areas. In this paper, we investigate multi-UAV collaborative data collection system, where multiple UAVs collect data from two-dimensional distributed devices on flying mode or hovering mode. The objective is to minimize UAVs’ total flight time while allowing each device to complete data upload successfully with limited energy. To this end, firstly, a cell partition based on Voronoi diagram is used to allocate the collection areas of each UAV. Then, in each associated area, UAV determines the whole trajectory to serve devices. Lastly, given load requirement of ground devices and energy limitation, the optimal data collection mode of each device is decided to minimize flight time of each UAV. Simulation results show that the proposed multi-UAV data collection scheme can shorten collection task completion time significantly.