UAV-Based Servicing of IoT Nodes: Assessment of Ecological Impact

Internet of Things (IoT) nodes get deployed for a variety of applications and often need to operate on batteries. This restricts their autonomy and/or can have a major ecological impact. The core idea of this paper is to use a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to provide energy to IoT nodes, and hence prolong their autonomy. In particular, the objective is to perform a comparison of the total energy consumption resulting from UAV-based recharging or battery replacement versus full provisioning at install time or remote RF-based wireless power transfer. To that end, an energy consumption model for a small license-free UAV is derived, and expressions for system efficiencies are formulated. An exploration of design and deployment parameters is performed. Our assessment shows that UAV-based servicing of IoT nodes is by far more beneficial in terms of energy efficiency when nodes at distances further than a few meters are serviced, with the gap increasing to orders of magnitude with the distance. Our numerical results also show that battery swapping from an energy perspective outperforms recharging in the field, as the latter increases hovering time and the energy consumption related to that considerably. The ecological aspects of the proposed methods are further evaluated, e.g., considering toxic materials and e-waste.

Automated summary

The core idea of this paper is to use a UAV to provide energy to IoT nodes, prolonging their autonomy. A comparison is made between UAV-based recharging or battery replacement and full provisioning or remote RF-based wireless power transfer in terms of total energy consumption. An energy consumption model for a small license-free UAV is derived, and design and deployment parameters are explored. The results show that UAV-based servicing is more energy efficient for IoT nodes at distances further than a few meters, with the advantage increasing with distance. Battery swapping outperforms recharging from an energy perspective, and the ecological aspects are also evaluated.