Elsevier

Ad Hoc Networks

Volume 106, 1 September 2020, 102220
Ad Hoc Networks

Impact of drone route geometry on information collection in wireless sensor networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2020.102220Get rights and content
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Abstract

The recent technological evolution of drones along with the constantly growing maturity of its commercialization, has led to the emergence of novel drone-based applications within the field of wireless sensor networks for information collection purposes. In such settings, especially when deployed in outdoor environments with limited external control, energy consumption and robustness are challenging problems for the system’s operation. In the present paper, a drone-assisted wireless sensor network is studied, the aim being to coordinate the routing of information (among the ground nodes and its propagation to the drone), investigating several drone trajectories or route shapes and examining their impact on information collection (the aim being to minimize transmissions and consequently, energy consumption). The main contribution lies on the proposed algorithms that coordinate the communication between (terrestrial) sensor nodes and the drone that may follow different route shapes. It is shown through simulations using soft random geometric graphs that the number of transmitted messages for each drone route shape depends on the rotational symmetry around the center of each shape. An interesting result is that the higher the order of symmetry, the lower the number of transmitted messages for data collection. Contrary, for those cases that the order of symmetry is the same, even for different route shapes, similar number of messages is transmitted. In addition to the simulation results, an experimental demonstration, using spatial data from grit bin locations, further validates the proposed solution under real-world conditions, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed approach.

Keywords

Drones
Wireless sensor networks
Information collection
Route shape
Internet of things
Soft geometric random graphs

Cited by (0)

Konstantinos Skiadopoulos holds a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Athens, Greece and an M.Sc. in informatics from the Department of Informatics at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Informatics at the Ionian University in 2019 and currently is a member of the NMS lab at the same department. He is, also, a Secondary Education teacher (1993-today) in Corfu, Greece. His research interests focus on algorithms, graph theory and information dissemination in networks.

Konstantinos Giannakis obtained his B.Sc. and his M.Sc. in informatics from the Department of Informatics at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece (in 2011 and 2013, respectively). He received his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from the Dept. of Informatics of the Ionian University in 2016. He is a collaborating member of the NMS lab at the same Department. He has participated in various funded projects, and served as a reviewer and TPC member for several conferences and journals. His research interests focus on the theory of computation with emphasis on automata theory, algorithms, quantum and bioinspired computation, game-theoretic models, bioinformatics, and wireless sensor networks. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dept. of Mathematics at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Athanasios Tsipis was born in Corfu, Greece in 1989. In February 2015, he received his B.Sc. degree in informatics from the Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Greece. In February 2017, he received his M.Sc. Diploma from the same Department, for which he was awarded a scholarship. Since March 2015, Athanasios Tsipis, is a member of the ‘Networks, Multimedia and Security Systems Laboratory’ (NMSLab) of the Ionian University. During this time he has been involved in EU and National funded development projects and has participated in numerous other similar research proposals. Furthermore, he has worked as an independent web and database programmer in the public and private sector. He is currently a Ph.D. Student in the area of Computer Networks, at the aforementioned Department. His current research interests concentrate on cloud gaming, cloud networking, edge/fog computing, 5G technologies, wireless systems, facility location problems, call admission control issues, etc.

Konstantinos Oikonomou has received his M.Eng. in computer engineering and informatics from University of Patras in 1998. In September 1999 he received his postgraduate degree: M.Sc. in communication and signal processing from the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College (London). He received his Ph.D. degree in 2004 from the Informatics and Telecommunications Department, University of Athens, Greece. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on medium access control policies in ad hoc networks. He is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Information Science and Informatics of the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. Since May 2018 he is the director of the M.Sc. Course ‘Research Directions in Informatics’ of the Department of Informatics of the same university. Since 2006 he is a faculty member in Computer Networks at the same department. He is an Associate Professor and he has also served as the Head of the Department. Between December 1999 and January 2005 he was employed at Intracom S.A, as a research and development engineer. His current interests involve medium access control in ad hoc networks, performance issues in wireless networks, information dissemination, service discovery, facility location, energy consumption in wireless sensor networks and network cost reduction in cloud computing environments. Dr. Oikonomou has a long experience regarding wireless systems and he has been co-ordinating a number of EC research projects in the computer networks research area and in various local development projects (e.g., virtual worlds). He has been a reviewer and TPC member of numerous conferences and journals in the area. He holds an award for the best paper from the Hawaii International Conference on System Service and another one from the Hellenic Mathematical Society.

Prof. Ioannis Stavrakakis (IEEE Fellow) (http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~ioannis/), is Professor in the Dept of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki and his Ph.D. in the same field from University of Virginia, USA. He served as Assistant Professor in CSEE, University of Vermont (USA), 1988–1994; Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston (USA), 1994–1999; Associate Professor of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), 1999–2002; and Professor since 2002. Teaching and research interests are focused on Analysis and Design aspects of networking technologies ranging from link to application layers: Social, mobile, ad hoc, autonomic, information-centric, delay tolerant and future Internet networking; network resource allocation algorithms & protocols, traffic management and performance evaluation; content dissemination, placement and (cooperative) replication in unstructured P2P and social networks; (human-driven) decision making in competitive environments. His research has been published in over 220 scientific journals and conference proceedings and was funded by USA-NSF, DARPA, GTE, BBN and Motorola (USA) as well as Greek and European Union (IST, FET, FIRE) funding agencies. He has received 2 Marie-Curie grants for training post and has supervised about 20 Ph.D. graduates. He has served repeatedly in NSF and EU-IST research proposal review panels and involved in the TPC and organization of numerous conferences sponsored by IEEE, ACM, ITC and IFIP societies. He has served as chairman of IFIP WG6.3 and elected officer for IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC). He has been in the editorial board of Proceedings of IEEE (2015-), Computer Communications (2008-), IEEE/ACM transactions on Networking, ACM /Springer Wireless Networks and Computer Networks journals. He has served as head of the Communications and Signal Processing Division, Director of Graduate Studies, Dept Vice-Chair and Dept Chair.

Part of this work was originally published in the proceedings of the Third International Balkan Conference on Communications and Networking (BalkanCom 2019), Skopje, North Macedonia, June 10–12, 2019.