Using Aerial Unmanned Vehicles for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work, we address data gathering in Wireless Sensors Networks. Wireless sensor networks are composed of small and autonomous sensor devices. Typical applications include monitoring and recording physical conditions of the environment. Sensors count on limited processing power, small storage space, radio for short range communications, and limited battery. One major issue in wireless sensor networks is data gathering. Data gathering based on static sinks incur in premature energy exhaustion in nodes near the sink. By using mobile collectors, wireless sensors networks can save energy since the data routes tend to be smaller. In this article, we propose three data gathering algorithms. We analyze different strategies to either avoid packet collisions and to retransmit lost packets. The results indicate that packet collisions may substantially affect the network performance in wireless sensor networks data gathering.