A Novel Cooperative Transmission Scheme in UAV-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the efficiency of data transmission within a limited time is critical, especially for sensors designed with small batteries. In this paper, we design a cooperative transmission scheme with an energy-charging function in a WSN where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is considered for sensory data collection and energy charging. Specially, the sensor nodes are powered by the UAV for their data transmission. In the first phase, the UAV transmits the energy signal to the sensor nodes distributed on the ground. All the energy received by the sensor nodes is used to collect and transmit the sensory data to the UAV. In the second phase, local data transmissions are conducted among the collaborating sensor nodes in one cluster. In the third phase, the cooperative nodes send the collected sensory data to the UAV in the form of cooperative transmission. In the proposed scheme, we discovered that the size of the modulation constellation and the assigned time ratio of each phase were the key factors affecting the data transmission efficiency. In order to achieve the maximum data transmission, the optimal modulation constellation size and the optimal time ratio of each phase were found using the Lagrange multiplier method. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme with the optimal constellation size and the optimal time ratio can outperform the existing scheme in terms of the data transmission efficiency.