LoRaWAN-Based Energy-Efficient Surveillance by Drones for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract

Urban networks aim at facilitating users for better experience and services through smart platforms such as the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). ITS focuses on information acquisition, sensing, contrivance control, data processing and forwarding to ground devices via user-specific application-interfaces. The utility of ITS is further improved via the Internet of Things (IoT), which supports “Connectivity to All”. One of the key applications of IoT-ITS is urban surveillance. Current surveillance in IoT-ITS is performed via fixed infrastructure-based sensing applications which consume an excessive amount of energy leading to several overheads and failures in the network. Such issues can be overcome by the utilization of on-demand nodes, such as drones, etc. However, drones-assisted surveillance requires efficient communication setup as drones are battery operated and any extemporaneous maneuver during monitoring may result in loss of drone or complete failure of the network. The novelty in terms of network layout can be procured by the utilization of drones with LoRaWAN, which is the protocol designated for Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN). However, even this architectural novelty alone cannot ascertain the formation of fail-safe, highly resilient, low-overhead, and non-redundant network, which is additionally the problem considered in this paper. To resolve such problem, this paper uses drones as LoRaWAN gateway and proposes a communication strategy based on the area stress, resilient factor, and energy consumption that avail in the efficient localization, improved coverage and energy-efficient surveillance with lower overheads, lower redundancy, and almost zero-isolations. The proposed approach is numerically simulated and the results show that the proposed approach can conserve a maximum of 39.2% and a minimum of 12.6% of the total network energy along with an improvement in the area stress between 89.7% and 53.0% for varying number of drones over a fixed area.

IoT System Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and LoRa Technology: A Performance Evaluation Study

“…In [30,31], the authors integrated WSN with UAVs and proposed an optimal trajectory design, minimizing the total path length, passing close to the main interesting points, and ensuring a minimal delay in the communication. Sharma et al [32] tested a LoRaWAN network using UAVs for urban surveillance focusing on stress areas, being able to preserve 40% of the network energy consumption.…”

Economic Efficiency of the Internet of Things Solution in the Energy Industry: A Very High Voltage Frosting Case Study

“…We identified several articles that discuss IoT topics in the energy industry [22][23][24], nevertheless, they discuss and analyze different issues and they mention issues that are solved in this article.…”

Improving the Energy Efficiency of a LoRaWAN by a UAV-based Gateway

“…Meanwhile, recently, the studies in which the authors suggest UAVs be used for improving the performance or enabling new functionalities within LoRaWAN have started to appear. Specifically, in [10], the UAVs are used to charge the LoRaWAN devices, and in [11]- [13], the UAVs are used to collect the data from LoRa and LoRaWAN sensors. In [11], the authors investigate how a drone-based gateway (GW) can improve the reliability of LoRaWAN communication in urban scenarios.…”

“…Specifically, in [10], the UAVs are used to charge the LoRaWAN devices, and in [11]- [13], the UAVs are used to collect the data from LoRa and LoRaWAN sensors. In [11], the authors investigate how a drone-based gateway (GW) can improve the reliability of LoRaWAN communication in urban scenarios. In [12], the authors assess how much can a drone increase the coverage of the network.…”