This paper presents a wireless data collection framework that employs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to efficiently gather data from distributed IoT sensors deployed in a large area. Our approach takes into account the non-zero communication ranges of the sensors to optimize the flight path of the UAV, resulting in a variation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). We prove mathematically that the optimal waypoints for this TSP-variant problem are restricted to the boundaries of the sensor communication ranges, greatly reducing the solution space. Building on this finding, we develop a low-complexity UAV-assisted sensor data collection algorithm, and demonstrate its effectiveness in a selected use case where we minimize the total energy consumption of the UAV and sensors by jointly optimizing the UAV's travel distance and the sensors' communication ranges.
@article{arxiv.2306.01355,
title = {Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted IoT Data Collection via TSP-Based Solution Space Reduction},
author = {Sivaram Krishnan and Mahyar Nemati and Seng W. Loke and Jihong Park and Jinho Choi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.01355},
year = {2023}
}