Wireless sensor network lifetime improvement by utilizing a Quadrotor as the mobile base station

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of small and cheap sensor nodes that have very limited computation and communication capability, energy, and storage capacity. WSN is used to collect data from sensing area and to transfer them to the base station. The base station in sensor networks is usually a node with high processing power, high storage capacity, and rechargeable battery or continuous power source. The base station can save energy consumption during data collection by moving closer to the transmitting nodes. In this study, a typical quadrotor, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), is considered as the mobile base station of WSN. The motion dynamics of the UAV are considered through base station motion optimization. The path of the base station is optimally designed in order to increase the WSN lifetime. Numerical simulation results confirm that the proposed control of the base station improves the lifetime and also considering the dynamics of the base station yields results that are closer to real implementation.

Keywords:

wireless sensor networks , clustering , mobile base station , Quadrotor