Energy-efficient deployment of IoT applications in remote rural areas using UAV networks
Jaime Galán–Jiménez, Alejandro Gonzalez Vegas, Javier Berrocal
Abstract
The Internet penetration rates are increasing every year, reaching more than 80% in developed countries. However, there are at least two billion people living in rural and low-income areas experiencing a complete lack of Internet connectivity, which prevents the deployment of key services such as remote health-care, emergency services, remote learning, or personal communications. In order to bring services closer to people living in rural areas, this paper exploits the capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to propose an UAV-based network architecture and an energy-efficient algorithm to deploy IoT applications that can improve the quality of life of rural population. In particular, IoT applications are decomposed into microservices, which are deployed into a subset of UAVs to overcome the limitations of running the whole IoT application at a single UAV, which could result in worse outcomes due to their battery and computation limitations. Simulation results over a realistic scenario show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, evaluating the percentage of IoT requests that are served to users in the area under evaluation and reducing the energy consumption required by UAVs when handling such requests.