Experimental Evaluation of Wake-up Radio Ranges for UAV-assisted Mobile Data Collection

This paper investigates the physical performance of mobile data collection systems comprising Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in conjunction with Wake-up Radio (WuR) technology to minimize the energy consumption of data exchange with Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes. We setup data collection experiments using a quad-rotor drone as the UAV and WuR-enabled motes as the communication nodes. Our experiments are calibrated using tests that measure flight time, communication range and the performance of data collection using WuR compared with that of data collection when the mote duty cycles. We confirm that collection using duty cycling consumes far more power and achieves lower reliability than collection using WuR technology. In our ranging experiments we observe that while the Mobile Data Collector (MDC) is flying at an altitude of approximately 5 m, reliability decreases monotonically with horizontal distance, averaging at 75.4% of all data packets being successfully collected, while latency averages at 27 ms. At an altitude of 10 m, reliability drops considerably to an average of 14.33%, while latency increases with horizontal distance, averaging at 71.16 ms.