Monitoring Passive Wireless Devices

This study suggests using user-initiated detecting and data gathering from power-limited and even passive wireless devices, such as passive RFID tags, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, that either power limitation or poor cellular coverage prevents them from communicating directly with wireless networks. While previous studies focused on sensors that continuously transmit their data, the focus of this study is on passive devices. The key idea is that instead of receiving the data transmitted by the sensor nodes, an external device (a reader), such as an unnamed aerial vehicle (UAV), or a smartphone is used to detect IoT devices and read the data stored in the sensor nodes, and then deliver it to the cloud, in which it is stored and processed. While previous studies on UAV-aided data collection from WSNs focused on UAV path planning, the focus of this study is on the rate at which the passive sensor nodes should be polled. That is, to find the minimal monitoring rate that still guarantees accurate and reliable data collection. The proposed scheme enables us to deploy wireless sensor networks over a large geographic area (e.g., for agricultural applications), in which the cellular coverage is very poor if any. Furthermore, the usage of initiated data collection can enable the deployment of passive WSNs. Thus, can significantly reduce both the operational cost, as well as the deployment cost, of the WSN. The performance of the proposed scheme was validated by simulation. The simulation results demonstrate a significant reduction in the power consumption of the sensors, in comparison with the power consumed by sensors in conventional WSNs.