On best drone tour plans for data collection in wireless sensor network.

The benefits of using mobile sinks or data mules for data collection in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) have been studied in several works. In this paper, we consider a drone with hovering capability as a mobile sink for data collection. Drones, however, have limited power supply that restricts their flying time. Hence, in addition to the WSN's energy cost, the energy cost of the drone itself must be also considered in order to increase the amount of collected data from the WSN. We investigate the problem of determining the best drone tour for data collection in a WSN, i.e., we focus on minimizing the overall drone time, that is the drone ying time plus the time needed to collect data from all WSN nodes. We propose two heuristic algorithms to solve this problem. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed heuristics provide performance close to the optimal one in small WSN instances and performance superior to naive strategies in larger instances (where optimal solution is computationally expensive).