Energy-Constrained UAV Data Acquisition in Wireless Sensor Networks with the Age of Information

This paper considers a wireless sensor network (WSN) assisted by the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the Internet of Things (IoT). The UAV departs from the data center to the ground node to collect sensor node data as a relay. Under the constraints of battery energy, the UAV will travel to and from the data center repeatedly and transmit the collected sensor node data. The freshness of the node data received by the data center is measured by the Age of Information (AoI) as a performance metric. A genetic algorithm is used to plan the flight trajectory of the UAV. To ensure the data's integrity and accuracy in a single sensor node, the UAV continuously collects sensor node data when the distance from the sensor node is less than the minimum acquisition distance. Through simulation experiments, we analyzed the influence of changing acquisition distance, the initial battery capacity, acquisition success probability, and transmission power on the peak age of information and the average age of information.