NTN-Aided Quality and Energy-Aware Data Collection in Time-Critical Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

Through the use of flying objects such as satellites and uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) have recently garnered interest in large-scale and developing wireless communication networks. UAV-assisted networks are quickly becoming part of future communication systems. This article overviews the recent works in which UAV-driven cluster-based data-gathering policies have been proposed for heterogeneous robotics and wireless sensor networks (RWSNs) where a UAV with limited-capacity battery visits a group of cluster head (CH) robots for gathering data by considering their energy consumption and data qualities under data hopping limits and NTN standards. In light of the importance of time-critical communications, an RWSN requires different data collection algorithms from WSN such that it includes no cluster-forming stage unlike the algorithms for WSN. Moreover, in the case of time-sensitive tasks under RWSN and under the quality and energy constraints, maximum latency from a nonvisited CH robot to a visited CH robot needs to be reduced with less number of hops in the RWSN. Further-more, the maximum number of forwarding attempts over a CH robot needs to be reduced, which is presented as an important future research direction. © 2018 IEEE.