Joint-optimization of Node Placement and UAV’s Trajectory for Self-sustaining Air-Ground IoT system

Due to the sustainable power supply and environment-friendly features, self-powered IoT devices have been increasingly employed in various fields such as providing observation data in remote areas, especially in rural areas or post-disaster scenarios. Generally, through multi-hop relay, the sensed data of those self-powered IoT devices are collected by the sink node which connects to the IoT backbones. However, due to the remoteness, the sink needs to be located at the border of the monitoring area where both the backbone of IoT and electrical infrastructures are accessible. Under such deployment, significant data flow and relay overhead will incur considering the large scale of the monitoring area. Motivated by this issue, this paper aims to design a UAV-assisted self-powered heterogeneous system to provide comprehensive monitoring data. In this system, because of the superiority of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the easy deployment, We dispatch a UAV to collect data from self-powered IoT devices, periodically so as to alleviate the data overflow. Moreover, based on that the self-powered IoT devices are expected to have a more considerable capability in the heavy data flow area, we also developed a placement upgrade strategy to upgrade the general homogeneous self-powered IoT system to the heterogeneous self-powered IoT system. Simulation results indicated the developed UAV-assisted self-powered heterogeneous system can achieve around 1.28× the amount of data delivery to sink compared with the homogeneous self-powered IoT system.