Abstract
In this paper, we consider a wireless sensor network consisting of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acting as a sink node and a number of sensor nodes scattered uncertainly on the ground. In the network, the UAV flies to a spatial point called point of interest and hovers to collect environmental data from neighboring sensor nodes. Then, the UAV proceeds to the next point of interest. The UAV must gather data from all the sensor nodes. On the other hand, a shorter round-trip air route of the UAV is more preferred since a battery-operated UAV needs regular recharging. To satisfy the requirement and to adhere to the recommendation as well, especially in the situation where only vague locational information about sensor nodes is available, we propose a scheme that follows three steps. First, it covers the sensor field of the wireless sensor network with three categories of hexagonal tessellations. Secondly, it establishes a point of interest at the centroid of each tile. Thirdly, it constructs an air route of the UAV, which visits every point of interest along a Hamiltonian cycle on the induced graph. Next, we develop a closed-form expression for the exact flight distance attained by the proposed scheme. For comparative evaluation, we discover some optimal schemes that minimize the flight distance by completely inspecting all patterns and corroborating the property of Hamiltonicity. The flight distance along the air route constructed by the proposed scheme is found to be only slightly longer than the flight distance yielded by an optimal scheme. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is proven to be practically valid when a common multicopter is employed as the sink node.