Delay-sensitive Trajectory Designing for UAV-enabled Data Collection in Internet of Things

In this paper, we consider a data collection problem using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) where the Internet of Things (IoT) is damaged. Different from the previous work, this paper is concerned with the communication delay of collected information for that the outdated data would delay the optical time to save lives and property. We study the delay-sensitive trajectory design problem in the damaged IoT networks, where the UAV is dispatched to collect data from the ground IoT devices. The communication delay of collected information refers to the interval between the times-tamps that the UAV arrives at the ground IoT device and returns to the base station. We formulate the delay-sensitive trajectory design problem as the symmetrical traveling salesman problem and prove it to be NP-hard. A Heuristic Algorithm (HA) is proposed to find the optimal delay-sensitive trajectory. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show how the maximum and average communication delays are affected by the network size.