Alarm delivery to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in wireless sensor networks using coordinators

This work presents a method of coordinating static ground sensors with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using coordinators. The ground wireless sensors are responsible for the primary detection of an event (e.g. intrusion in the monitored area). After the initial detection, a suitable UAV, equipped with high quality surveillance devices, should be designed inspect the event´s area. A method combining a geographic routing with a UAV-CoordinatorPosition function that is responsible to deliver the initial alarm to the selected UAV is presented. In this method, each UAV has a coordinator node on the ground network. This coordinator receive periodic updates of the UAV actual position. When an alarm is issued by any ground sensor, it is forwarded to the appropriated coordinator, and it is then responsible to forward using the geo-routing to the selected UAV. The position of the coordinator is determined by the UAV-CoordinatorPosition function which receives the characteristics of the UAV as input and returns the position of the corresponding coordinator. Results showed the efficiency of the proposed method, reducing by 45.39% the number of hops needed to find the appropriate UAV in comparison with the strategy using a bio-inspired method presented in the literature. In most cases, the UAV could handle at least 65% of the alarms.