A Link Quality Estimation Model for a Joint Deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Wireless Sensor Networks

In the past two decades, several applications have been proposed for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Some of these applications, such as habitat monitoring, active volcano monitoring, and toxic gas detection, exclude the involvement of human presence because the environments are either dangerous, inaccessible, or too extensive. The scope of these applications can be extended if the ground networks are assisted by a network of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Paramount to this is the stability of the wireless links the UAVs establish with the ground nodes. Lossy and unstable links are costly to maintain the UAVs may exhaust their batteries prematurely. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the stability of aerial-to-ground links and propose a stochastic model to predict link quality as a function of time. The model can be used to estimate goodput, determine mission duration, and estimate short-term link connection and disconnection durations.