Mission time minimization for UAV-supported data distribution in Internet of Things

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used to transmit data to Internet of Things (IoT) devices in various industrial, civil and military applications because of their flexibility and mobility. Some emergency situations pose strict requirements for UAV mission completion time. Therefore, this paper investigates a UAV-supported data distribution network, where a UAV is dispatched to distribute data to a group of IoT devices. We propose a device attribution (DA) based cluster-by-cluster (CBC) communication strategy. The objective is to minimize UAV mission time while satisfying the required data amount of all devices. To this end, we propose a mission time optimization algorithm (MTOA), whose key lies in invoking DA mechanism to determine the device belonging in the coverage of overlapping clusters. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can effectively reduce the mission time compared with the baseline ones, offering an innovative method for solving complex device attribution issues. Furthermore, the proposed strategy is expected to exhibit a significant potential in scenarios involving the high-density IoT device deployment.