Energy Constrained Data Collection in Multi-UAV-Assisted IoT

Benefit to the advantages of low cost, strong security, flexibility and high line-of-sight (LoS), UAVs constitute a promising platform to accomplish data collection for the IoT networks. However, it has to be admitted that the constrained energy consumption of UAVs has become the main challenge for the UAV-assisted IoT data collection. The existed works are mainly based on the assumption that the amount of data uploaded by different devices are the same, which makes the energy consumption of UAVs deviating from the real situation. Therefore, in this paper, for the sake of practical consideration, the amount of data uploaded varies from different devices in a multi-UAV-assisted IoT data collection scenario. To solve the problem of minimizing the total energy consumption of UAVs, we decouple it into two subproblems, devices clustering and UAVs trajectory planning, and propose an iterative optimization algorithm with energy and data volume constraints. Numerical results show that the performance of the proposed method outperforms the comparison schemes significantly in terms of saving total UAVs energy consumption and reducing the standard deviation of UAVs energy consumption.