It is not uncommon to see sensor nodes deployed in an uneven or hilly terrain.
This can be found in many parts of Nigeria. In the same vain, sensor nodes may
be deployed in very hostile areas such as in northern parts of Nigeria where
insurgents are heavily present. In areas such as those stated above, the use of
unmanned aerial vehicles can be used for energy-efficient data collection from the
scattered sensor nodes. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles operating at low altitudes can
be used to lower the energy consumption of the wireless sensor network by using
an intelligent data collection methodology to distribute the UAVs for data
collection from the nodes. This paper proposes an energy-efficient and optimized
data aggregation (EEODA) scheme in UAV-assisted wireless sensor network for
hilly and uneven terrain is designed, using UAVs as data collection points. This
can be achieved through the following steps, firstly, a distributed clustering
algorithm based on reinforcement learning was proposed to organize the wireless
sensor nodes, secondly, a mono-objective simulated annealing search method will
be used to efficiently distribute the UAVs for optimum collection of data from the
various cluster heads in the network, thirdly the city section mobility model will
be used to compute the optimum position for the UAVs to each of the cluster
heads in the network. Simulation results show that EEODA scheme proposed in
this paper outperforms the EFDC, the closest-performing algorithm to it with an
average of 12%. It also outperforms the other two compared algorithms, LEACH
with UAV and HEED with UAV with between 17% and 36%, respectively with
performance metrics such as energy consumption of nodes, scalability, delay in
data aggregation and collection, control overhead and number of dead nodes in
each round of clustering.
Keywords: Aggregation, data collection, genetic algorithm, reinforcement
algorithm, HEED, Unmanned Aerial vehicle, drone, modified simulated
annealing, wireless sensor network.
