System design and analysis of UAV-assisted BLE wireless sensor systems

Inefficiency of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in terms of the network lifetime is one of the major reasons preventing their widespread use. To alleviate this problem different data collection approaches have been proposed. One of the promising techniques is to use unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In spite of several papers advocating this approach, there have been no system designs and associated performance evaluation proposed to date. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a new WSN design, where UAV serves as a sink while Bluetooth low energy (BLE) is used as a communication technology. We analyze the proposed design in terms of the network lifetime and area coverage comparing it with routed WSNs. Our results reveal that the lifetime of the proposed design is approximately two orders of magnitude longer than that of the routed WSNs. Using the tools of integral geometry we show that the density of nodes to cover a certain area is approximately two times more for routed WSNs compared to our design.