This paper presents a wireless data collection framework that employs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to efficiently gather data from distributed IoT sensors deployed in a large area. Our approach takes into account the non-zero communication ranges of the sensors to optimize the flight path of the UAV, resulting in a variation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). We prove mathematically that the optimal waypoints for this TSP-variant problem are restricted to the boundaries of the sensor communication ranges, greatly reducing the solution space. Building on this finding, we develop a low-complexity UAV-assisted sensor data collection algorithm, and demonstrate its effectiveness in a selected use case where we minimize the total energy consumption of the UAV and sensors by jointly optimizing the UAV's travel distance and the sensors' communication ranges.

翻译：本文提出一种无线数据收集框架，利用无人机高效采集大范围分布式物联网传感器数据。该方法考虑传感器非零通信范围以优化无人机飞行路径，由此衍生出旅行商问题（TSP）的一种变体。我们通过数学证明，该TSP变体问题的最优航点严格限制在传感器通信范围的边界上，从而大幅缩减解空间。基于这一发现，我们开发了一种低复杂度的无人机辅助传感器数据收集算法，并在特定用例中验证其有效性：通过联合优化无人机的飞行距离与传感器的通信范围，使无人机和传感器的总能耗最小化。