GrADyS: Exploring movement awareness for efficient routing in Ground-and-Air Dynamic Sensor Networks

Several situations exist where a geographic region of some size needs to be scanned or monitored through many sensors. Still, it is either absolutely impossible or prohibitively expensive to deploy and maintain wireless communication infrastructure for the distributed sensors. Either because the region is hidden behind walls, not easily accessible, hard to get through, or infected with some lethal bacteria or virus transmitter. In this case, the best is to scatter (disposable) sensors in the region and let them transmit the collected sensor data by wireless means to an overflying UAV/drone. Which then physically hauls the collected data from the monitored area to a central base station that functions as a gateway to the Internet. The project GrADyS aims to research two sets of problems regarding such data collection. The former aims to coordinate several autonomous UAVs in a distributed manner to collect the generated data while relying only on ad-hoc communication. The latter aims to develop routing protocols to mesh networks Bluetooth Mesh's Low Power Nodes. Both research lines already present preliminary results that are presented in this paper.