An Online Resource Management for Obscured Sensors in Agriculture using UAV

Agriculture-based Internet of Things (Ag-IoT) can generate near-real-time quantitative data to analyze crop growth. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based mobile edge computing systems is widely used in Ag-IoT due to the low cost, fast movement and ease of operation of UAVs. Nevertheless, sensors in agriculture may be under a tall and dense crop canopy or under the soil where they have difficulty harvesting a steady of energy and have too worse a channel condition to transmit more data. This paper considers a UAV-Sensor Collaboration Wireless Network (USCWN) in which each UAV carries a computation module and a wireless power transfer module to provide service and energy to sensors. Then, we propose an online resource management framework with two sub-algorithms to maximize the network throughput of USCWN. The first is the sensor fuzzy selection algorithm, which determines which UAV the sensor transmits data to, considering the different resource properties between sensors and UAVs without prior knowledge. The other is a semi-distributed dynamic resource allocation algorithm in which the sensors compete with UAV’s energy, computation, and communication resources in a stochastic game. The UAV acts as a game manager to manage sensor resources. The stochastic game is solved using Lyapunov optimization, which yields a coarse correlated equilibrium that is better than the nash equilibrium. Performance evaluation shows that our proposed framework has a higher network throughput than other agricultural works and maintains stable sensor energy.