Roles of UAVs in IoT work-flow architecture

Recent advancements in various ICT technologies and integration of machine-learning and AI have further extended the Internet of Things (IoT) perspective from ’passive system of interconnected things’ to "an active multi-agent-based system of interconnected everything". However, true realization of future IoT solutions requires addressing critical challenges including limited network coverage and resources. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently gained significant attention due to their acute mobility, equitable operational costs, flexible deployment, and autonomous capabilities. Efforts are being made towards integrating drones in IoT as a solution to the critical challenges. In this paper, we highlighted the key expectations based on the new perspective of IoT and summarized the challenges in IoT due to its inherent nature towards contentment of those expectations. Finally, we investigated the roles of UAVs at various functional layers of IoT-workflow architecture towards addressing the critical issues and enabling key expectations in future-IoT solutions.