Time-Constrained Erasure Correction for Data Recovery in UAV-Aided IoT

We propose data-recovery schemes to improve the uplink reliability of Internet of Things (IoT) networks in which a gateway mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects data from sensor nodes on the ground. The proposed techniques employ fountain coding and message replication to correct frame erasures on the sensor-to-UAV links. A salient feature of the proposed schemes is their adaptive selection of the redundancy amount depending on the contact times between a sensor and the UAV. We illustrate our design philosophy for the special case of a network in which wake-up radios (WuRs) are used for activating the sensors upon the UAV's arrival, and the sensor-to-UAV data transfer employs the Long Range (LoRa) communication technology with random access.