Massive heterogeneous data collecting in UAV‐assisted wireless IoT networks

Abstract

This paper investigates the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)‐assisted wireless communication network that collects the data information of Internet of things (IoT) devices deployed in the region, where the cellular networks cannot cover. Due to the numerous variety and number of IoT devices, a large amount of data generated by IoT networks needs to be collected by UAV. The goal of this paper is to minimize the UAV's cruise time with the joint optimization of IoT devices communication scheduling, UAV trajectory, and transmit bandwidth allocation. To facilitate data collection by UAVs, the data‐distance‐k‐means (d2‐k‐means) algorithm is proposed to divide IoT devices into multiple initial clusters. However, the formulated problem is mixed‐integer joint non‐convex, so it is difficult to solve directly. Since it may be with relatively high computational complexity, as an alternative, a block coordinate descent (BCD)‐based method is designed. To tackle the non‐convex problem, a successive convex approximation (SCA)‐based algorithm is also proposed. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is able to achieve significant performance over other schemes for scenarios of UAV‐assisted wireless IoT networks to collect massive amount of data.