UAV-aided Sensory Data Aggregation: Incremental Clustering and Scheduling Approach

Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been considered as an effective way to collect data from a sensor network spanning over a wide area. Existing schemes usually divide the network into several clusters, and the UAV visits the cluster heads one by one to collect the gathered data. However, they only solved how to efficiently plan the UAV trajectory and neglected the data aggregation time within each cluster. This paper proposes an incremental clustering and scheduling scheme, in which the transmission schedule of sensors is calculated in line with the UAV trajectory and velocity. The cluster head that the UAV visits at a later time will be given more time to collect data from its cluster. As a result, the data aggregation time is significantly shorter.