A Survey on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Assisted Internet of Things: A Service-Oriented Classification

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are well-developed technologies that were first utilized for military applications such as border monitoring and reconnaissance in hostile territories. With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems and smart mobile devices, several applications in various industrial, agricultural, smart homes, smart cities, smart transportation, etc. domains have emerged. These applications usually require broad coverage, high energy consumption, computation-intensive processing, and access to rich data gathered by sensor devices. UAVs’ inherent features such as high dynamicity, low deployment and operational costs, quick deployment, and line of sight communication have motivated researchers in the IoT domain to consider UAVs integration into IoT systems toward the notion of UAV-assisted IoT systems. In this paper, recent literature on UAV-assisted services in IoT environments is studied. A service-oriented classification is applied in order to categorize the presented schemes into four broad domains of UAV-assisted data-related services, UAV-assisted battery charging, UAV-assisted communications, and UAV-assisted Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The literature belonging to each category is summarized with respect to their main points. Finally, some possible future directions are discussed to highlight the challenges associated with designing UAV-assisted IoT systems.