Thanks to the advantages of flexible deployment and high mobility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in the areas of disaster management, agricultural plant protection, environment monitoring and so on. With the development of UAV and sensor technologies, UAV assisted data collection for Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted increasing attentions. In this article, the scenarios and key technologies of UAV assisted data collection are comprehensively reviewed. First, we present the system model including the network model and mathematical model of UAV assisted data collection for IoT. Then, we review the key technologies including clustering of sensors, UAV data collection mode as well as joint path planning and resource allocation. Finally, the open problems are discussed from the perspectives of efficient multiple access as well as joint sensing and data collection. This article hopefully provides some guidelines and insights for researchers in the area of UAV assisted data collection for IoT.

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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) hold great potential to support a wide range of applications due to the high maneuverability and flexibility. Compared with single UAV, UAV swarm carries out tasks efficiently in harsh environment, where the network resilience is of vital importance to UAV swarm. The network topology has a fundamental impact on the resilience of UAV network. It is discovered that scale-free network topology, as a topology that exists widely in nature, has the ability to enhance the network resilience. Besides, increasing network throughput can enhance the efficiency of information interaction, improving the network resilience. Facing these facts, this paper studies the throughput of UAV Network with scale-free topology. Introducing the hybrid network structure combining both ad hoc transmission mode and cellular transmission mode into UAV Network, the throughput of UAV Network is improved compared with that of pure ad hoc UAV network. Furthermore, this work also investigates the optimal setting of the hop threshold for the selection of ad hoc or cellular transmission mode. It is discovered that the optimal hop threshold is related with the number of UAVs and the parameters of scale-free topology. This paper may motivate the application of hybrid network structure into UAV Network.