Information Collection and Energy Charging for UAV-aided Wireless Sensor Network Based on a Two-layer Task Assignment Strategy

In large monitoring area, sensors in the wireless sensor network (WSN) needs to send the environmental information back to distant base station. To solve the potential problems of information transmission quality and energy consumption in WSN, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is adopted to collect the observation information from sensors and charge them. In this paper, a two-layer task assignment strategy is proposed to realize the information collection (IC) and energy charging (EC) in WSN. Firstly, the whole monitoring area of wireless sensor network is divided into multiple subregions. According to the task needs of each subregions, base station will send different multi-UAV teams to perform IC and EC tasks on these subregions. Then, to minimize the flight paths of multi-UAV team in each subregions, consensus-based bundle algorithm is used to generate corresponding task assignment schedules. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed two-layer task assignment strategy ensures that sensors in the WSN can upload observation promptly and have sufficient energy.