Trajectory Planning for Data Collection in Multi-UAV Assisted WSNs

Abstract

The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for data collection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is gaining recently more research interest, thanks to the numerous advantages of UAVs. In fact, UAVs can be deployed quickly almost anywhere and are able to access difficult terrains. However, both WSNs and UAV suffer from serious energy limitation challenges. Fortunately, when they are available, using multiple UAVs along with appropriate trajectory planning schemes can highly reduce the negative impact of this problem. In this paper, we deal with the problem of data collection in a WSN assisted by multiple UAVs. Our main goal is to minimize the mission total time by jointly optimizing the trajectories of all the UAVs while serving the sensor nodes (SNs). The mission total time is defined as the time required by the UAVs to transfer energy to all using wireless power transfer (WPT) and collect data from these SNs. In addition to the highly complex optimal solution, we propose two heuristics to solve the formulated problem, namely the nearest insertion algorithm (NIA) and the greedy algorithm (GA).