A Simulation Study for UAV- Aided Wireless Sensor Network Utilizing ZigBee Protocol

摘要

Wireless sensor networks have been used in several applications to perform remote monitoring for a certain Area of Interest. In this work, we propose to utilize an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to improve the ground network connectivity, act as a data mule that collects the captured data and off-load the ground sensor nodes, who have normally limited storage capacities. We have investigated the effect of several parameters that affect the communication between the UAV and the ground sensors such as the UAV height, communication channel weather conditions, and nodes' noise factor, and evaluated the network performance measured by the average packet loss rate, end-to-end delay, and throughput. We found out that when the nodes' transceivers have a relatively high noise factor (above 20), it is recommended to keep the UAV altitude around 150 meters or below. We also noticed that the performance degrades drastically when having severe weather conditions, which requires additional mechanisms for improving the transmission performance such as the usage of error correction codes and Multiple Input Multiple Output antennas.