Towards Design of an Efficient Sensing Data Acquisition Scheme for UAVs-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper investigates sensing data acquisition issues from large-scale hazardous environments using UAVs-assisted WSNs. Most of the existing schemes suffer from low scalability, high latency, low throughput, and low service time of the deployed network. To overcome these issues, we considered a clustered WSN architecture in which multiple UAVs are dispatched with assigned path knowledge for sensing data acquisition from each cluster heads (CHs) of the network. This paper first presents a non-cooperative Game Theory (GT)-based CHs selection algorithm and load balanced cluster formation scheme. Next, to provide timely delivery of sensing information using UAVs, hybrid meta-heuristic based optimal path planning algorithm is proposed by combing the best features of Dolphin Echolocation and Crow Search meta-heuristic techniques. In this research work, a novel objective function is formulated for both load-balanced CHs selection and for optimal the path planning problem. Results analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly performs better than the state-of-art schemes.