Near-Optimal Multi-Delivery Drone Scheduling for Wireless Data Collection

To alleviate energy hole problem inherent in static Base station (BS) scheme and extend network work of battery-restricted wireless rechargable sensor networks, a joint mobile data col-lection and adaptive charging scheduling (MDC-ACS) scheme based on virtual grid is proposed in this paper, aiming to achieve whole network energy balance and high charging effi-ciency. In MDC-ACS scheme, network is firstly divided into several grids and several rendezvous are determined using geo-graphic information. Then, mobile data collector (MDC) moves in grids for data collection within the application delay and moving trajectory is guided by rendezvous. Due to the limited battery capacity of mobile wirelsee charging vehicle (WCV) and its energy consumption while cruising, an adaptive charging schedule scheme is proposed for maximizing recharging benefit. With extensive simulation, we demonstrate that MDC-ACS scheme can achieve better charging benefit and reduce average charging delay.

With the explosive increase of wireless traffic generated by Internet of Things (IoT), it is challenging for the ground communication infrastructures to achieve flexible and efficient data collection. In this paper, we propose an intelligent trajectory optimization and collision avoidance scheme for cooperative multi-UAV data collection in urban IoT environments, where a new Double Deep Q-Network (D3QN) is designed to maximize the total collected data by optimizing UAVs' flying speeds and dynamically adjusting the IoT-UAV associations. Simulations show that the proposed solution achieves the fastest convergence and the lowest collision rate with the average data collection rate of 91.15%, compared to baseline methods. Moreover, 4 UAVs can achieve the data collection rate of 95% compared to that of 50% in single UAV scenario.

Sensor nodes equipped with various sensory devices can sense a wide range of information regarding human or things, thereby providing a foundation for Internet of Thing (IoT). Fast and energy-efficient data collection to the control center (CC) is of significance yet very challenging. To deal with this challenge, a low redundancy data collection (LRDC) scheme is proposed to reduce delay as well as energy consumption for monitoring network by using matrix completion technique. Due to the correlation of the location-dependent sensing data, some data without being collected can still be recovered by the matrix completion technology, thereby reducing the data amount for data collection and transmission, reducing the network energy consumption, and accelerating the process of data acquisition. Based on matrix completion technique, LRDC scheme can select only part of the nodes to sense data and transmit less data to CC. By doing so, the data collected by the network can be greatly reduced, which can effectively improve the network lifetime. In addition, LRDC scheme also proposes a method for quickly compensate sample data in cases of packet loss, whereby part of redundant data is sent in advance to the area closer to CC. If the data required for matrix completion is lost, these redundant data can be quickly obtained by CC, so the LRDC scheme has low delay characteristics. Simulation results demonstrate that LRDC scheme can achieve better performance than the traditional strategy, and it can reduce the maximum energy consumption of the network by 27.6–57.9% and reduce the delay by 0.7–17.9%.

An Adaptive Transmission Range Based Topology Control (ATRTC) scheme is proposed to reduce delay and improve reliability for data collection in delay and loss sensitive wireless sensor network. The core idea of the ATRTC scheme is to extend the transmission range to speed up data collection and improve the reliability of data collection. The main innovations of our work are as follows: (1) an adaptive transmission range adjustment method is proposed to improve data collection reliability and reduce data collection delay. The expansion of the transmission range will allow the data packet to be received by more receivers, thus improving the reliability of data transmission. On the other hand, by extending the transmission range, data packets can be transmitted to the sink with fewer hops. Thereby the delay of data collection is reduced and the reliability of data transmission is improved. Extending the transmission range will consume more energy. Fortunately, we found the imbalanced energy consumption of the network. There is a large amount of energy remains when the network died. ATRTC scheme proposed in this paper can make full use of the residual energy to extend the transmission range of nodes. Because of the expansion of transmission range, nodes in the network form multiple paths for data collection to the sink node. Therefore, the volume of data received and sent by the near‐sink nodes is reduced, the energy consumption of the near‐sink nodes is reduced, and the network lifetime is increased as well. (2) According to the analysis in this paper, compared with the CTPR scheme, the ATRTC scheme reduces the maximum energy consumption by 9%, increases the network lifetime by 10%, increases the data collection reliability by 7.3%, and reduces the network data collection time by 23%.

An efficient data collection scheme plays an important role for the real-time intelligent monitoring in many machine-to-machine (M2M) networks. In this paper, a distributed joint cluster formation and resource allocation scheme for data collection in cluster-based M2M networks is proposed. Specifically, in order to utilize the advantages of cooperation, we first propose a hierarchical transmission model which contains two communication phases. In the first phase, the intracluster information sharing is carried out by all the nodes within the same cluster. Then these nodes transmit the total information to the BS cooperatively with virtual-MIMO (VMIMO) protocol in the second phase. To grasp the properties and advantages of this cooperative transmission strategy, the theoretical analysis results are provided. The key issue in this system is to form the clusters and allocate resources efficiently. Since the optimization problem on this issue is an NP-hard problem, a feasible joint scheme for the cluster formation and resource allocation is proposed in this paper, which is carried out via coalition formation game with a distributed algorithm. This scheme can reduce the complexity while keeping an attractive performance. Simulation results show the properties of the proposed scheme and its advantages when comparing with the noncooperative scheme for the data collection in a practical scenario.

Relevance. The growing integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into all areas of human life – from intelligent households to smart city infrastructure – is accompanied by an exponential increase in the volume of data being collected, transmitted, and processed in real time. When combined with artificial intelligence technologies, this data becomes the foundation for making autonomous decisions, predicting user behavior, and adapting environments to the needs of specific individuals. However, it is precisely in this context that the critically important issue of personal data protection arises. Many IoT devices operate in uncontrolled environments, have limited resources for cryptographic protection, and are vulnerable to cyberattacks and unauthorized data collection. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence algorithms used to analyze this data often exhibit the “black box” problem, where it is impossible to fully explain how and why a particular decision was made based on personalized data. The lack of transparency, combined with broad access to sensitive information, threatens fundamental human rights to privacy. The relevance of this topic is driven by the need to find balanced technical solutions that enable both effective analysis of large-scale data in IoT environments and a high level of data security. In this regard, the study of modern methods for processing, analyzing, and protecting data in IoT systems, adapted to the requirements of ethical artificial intelligence and digital privacy standards, represents one of the key challenges of contemporary digital science. The object of research: the processes of data collection, processing, analysis, and protection in IoT systems, particularly those components related to the use of users' personal information and its processing through artificial intelligence methods. Purpose of the article: research of modern methods for data processing and analysis in IoT systems. The objective of the work is to identify the most effective approaches to secure data handling, characterize existing privacy threats, and assess the potential for integrating protected analytical algorithms that meet both the technical and ethical requirements of the digital environment. Research results. A comprehensive analysis of modern approaches to data collection, processing, analysis, and protection in IoT systems has been conducted, particularly in the context of the growing role of artificial intelligence. The technological foundations of IoT functionality were examined, key architectural components identified, and their role in creating digital ecosystems for monitoring, management, and decision-making across various sectors – from household systems to critical infrastructure – was investigated. Special attention was paid to data preprocessing methods, which help reduce information load, improve the quality of analysis, and adapt data flows to the requirements of intelligent algorithms. It was demonstrated that the use of edge processing and local-level aggregation enhances both system performance and security. The main types of databases for IoT – especially those optimized for time series – were analyzed, along with tools for handling large volumes of data in cloud and hybrid environments. Conclusions. Data collection methods in IoT are multilayered and closely linked to the requirements for energy efficiency, security, latency, and system scalability. The quality and reliability of the collected information form the foundation for subsequent processing, analysis, and decision-making; therefore, the selection of sensors, communication protocols, and architectural models is of strategic importance for any IoT system. Preprocessing and efficient data storage in IoT are critical stages that ensure the quality, security, and usability of information for further analysis. They determine not only the accuracy of analytics but also the stability, scalability, and compliance with regulatory standards. This creates a demand for the development of adaptive, intelligent data processing and storage systems capable of dynamically responding to changes in device operation context and user requirements. The successful implementation of secure IoT solutions requires an integrated approach that combines technical expertise, legal knowledge, and ethical responsibility.

In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), the large-scale generation and collection of data can greatly improve the quality of service provided, but they also raise significant concerns about privacy breaches. However, existing privacy-preserving data collection solutions based on local differential privacy (LDP) often struggle to balance security and accuracy when handling composite data types. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose CSKV, a high-precision and privacy-preserving key-value data collection scheme. Specifically, we first design a padding and sampling protocol to improve data utility. Then, we propose two randomized response mechanisms to safely perturb keys and values in a cohesive and segmented manner. After that, by leveraging the sampling protocol and key-value correlation perturbation, we demonstrate that CSKV can provide secondary privacy amplification. Detailed theoretical analysis verifies the security and effectiveness of CSKV. In addition, extensive performance evaluations are conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets, and the results indicate that our proposed scheme outperforms existing schemes in terms of hit rate and estimation variance.

Large number of Internet of Things (IoT) applications with intelligent sensing devices (ISDs) are combined with cloud computing to collect and process data more efficiently. However, ISDs are vulnerable to various attacks. Compromised devices may maliciously provide unreliable data to the cloud, causing damage to IoT applications. Therefore, it is a critical issue to design an effective mechanism to ensure the security of data collection in cloud computing. In this article, a cloud-assisted reliable trust computing (CRTC) scheme is proposed to identify the trust of ISDs at low cost, providing high-quality data for IoT applications. The CRTC scheme mainly includes the following parts: First, a reliable approach of obtaining the real data of ISDs at a low cost is proposed to identify the trust of ISDs. In the proposed method, ISDs fits the forwarding packets information to form inspection information (II) with a small amount of data and then sends II to inspection nodes, effectively reducing the cost of routing II. Second, an effective method of trust computing is given to evaluate the trustworthiness of ISDs based on the data and II collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Then, the aggregators are selected from high-trust ISDs to ensure secure data collection. Third, to obtain more reliable trust at lower cost, a trajectory optimization algorithm for UAV is proposed to collect as much II as possible and reduce the moving distance. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed CRTC scheme is superior to previous strategies in terms of the success rate of data collection, the speed of identifying the trust of ISDs, and the UAV's trajectory distance.

This paper studies the integration of data collection and offloading for maritime Internet of Things (IoT) systems with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In the considered multi-UAV maritime IoT system, the UAVs act as the aerial base stations to complete the missions of data collection from buoys and data offloading to the offshore base station (OBS). In this case, the UAVs need to adaptively select the mission mode between data collection and data offloading according to the network resources and mission requirements. In this paper, we aimed to minimize the completion time of data collection and offloading missions for all UAVs by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectories, mission mode selection, transmit power of buoys, and association relationships between the UAVs and buoy/OBS. In order to solve the mixed-integer non-convex minimization problem, we first designed a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm based on a hybrid discrete and continuous action space to preliminarily obtain the UAV trajectories, mission mode selection, and the transmit power of buoys. Then, we propose an algorithm based on the stable marriage problem to determine the buoy–UAV and UAV–OBS association relationships. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively shorten the total mission completion time of data collection and offloading for the multi-UAV-assisted maritime IoT system.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an essential component of the digital age, particularly in ensuring reliable and efficient operations as well as the timely and precise recognition of anomalies within IoT systems. However, anomaly detection in time-series data—especially data collected by edge devices—poses several challenges, including concerns over data privacy and communication overhead. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel deep learning (DL)-based anomaly detection model capable of being trained in real-time on edge devices within an IoT environment. The framework ensures user privacy by enabling distributed edge devices to cooperatively train an anomaly recognition system. This study introduces a new, Intelligent Shark Smell Tuned Deep Isolation Forest (ISS-DIF), which effectively detects anomalies and identifies outliers in industrial IoT sensor data with high accuracy. The hybrid model isolates anomalies rather than profiling normal data, making it particularly suitable for identifying rare anomalies within large datasets. Industrial data are collected from real-world manufacturing environments using IoT edge devices. Following data collection, median filtering is applied to reduce noise, and min-max scaling is employed for data normalization. The ISS component allows for fine-tuning the hyperparameters of the Deep Isolation Forest (DIF) to optimize detection performance. The DIF model is tailored to enhance anomaly detection capabilities in sensor data from industrial IoT applications. For validation, 80% of the dataset was used for training, while the remaining 20% served as the test set. The results demonstrate that the proposed ISS-DIF framework achieved superior training accuracy of 99.30%, with precision of 97.89%, recall of 98.76%, and an F1-score of 97.21%, outperforming the testing metrics. This approach integrates real-time anomaly detection with the processing capabilities of edge devices, thereby improving IoT data analytics and providing a scalable, efficient solution that preserves privacy in irregularity recognition within IoT environments.

Growing plants without soil is known as hydroponics, and it is particularly helpful in places with little space and bad weather. A novel method of growing plants without soil in an inert medium is called hydroponics. By avoiding pesticides and other substances that degrade soil and land quality, hydroponics enables farmers to conserve water while enhancing crop quality. Due to its high efficiency and role as an environmentally benign substitute for soil culture, it has the ability to close the gap left by India’s low agricultural productivity. This farming process has leveraged several new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), making integration of intelligent management and real-time data monitoring and collection systems possible. This farming process also allows for a greater degree of automation and refinement in the control process of the hydroponic systems. Via this paper, we have discussed the development of a hydroponic subsystem that leverages agents for cloud-based monitoring, data collection, and storage for future analysis and heuristics. This paper presents an intuitive and low-cost approach to monitoring and accelerating plant growth based on Hydroponics and IoT with tools such as automated environment parameter monitoring and error rectification, sub-second streaming of telemetry from ground units to cloud servers and allowing users to access the status of the plant or system of plants being monitored as a plant health index from anywhere in the world, via a mobile application. The end goal of this paper is to understand the benefits one obtains by adopting a Hydroponics based cultivation system, which would show up as lower water consumption, minimal space usage, increased control over nutrients being introduced, and much more effective protection against pests and diseases when coupled with the feature of emphasizing each plant genus being cultivated via plant profile templates. This approach will not only revolutionize the millennial approach to farming but also act as a stepping stone in the direction of complete automation in farming.

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables the passive collection of personal data at an unprecedented scale by ubiquitous devices built into our daily lives. However, IoT devices neither provide notice or collect consent as recommended by the U. S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fair information practice principles. IoT devices may, based on their physical limitation, not even be capable of compliance. Requirements engineers need concrete methodologies to identify, understand, and limit risks to customer privacy posed by IoT devices. We conducted an exploratory case study of the privacy policy for an archetypical IoT device, a SmartTV. We employed the Goal-Based Requirements Analysis Method to extract goals from applicable Samsung U. S. privacy policy documents and classified the resulting goals with the Anton-Earp privacy goal taxonomy. The goal of this research is to characterize the privacy protections and vulnerabilities posed by this example IoT device and its associated policies. In particular, we seek to assess whether data collection is apparent to the average user and evaluate the extent to which a SmartTV exposes users to cloud computing's privacy vulnerabilities. Our results suggest that: (1) users face increased risk of privacy harms from SmartTVs, (2) most data collection by SmartTVs is not apparent to the average user, and (3) many SmartTV goals further compromise user privacy by requiring connection to manufacturer backend servers.

Thanks to smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to play a critical role in future Internet of things (IoT) networks to execute data collection tasks. In this article, we leverage age of information (AoI) to measure the freshness of data packets received by the UAV from IoT sensors. Considering the heterogeneity of IoT devices, we aim to minimize the weighted sum AoI by jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory and IoT devices association in UAV-assisted IoT networks, where the UAV's cumulative propulsion energy cost is limited by the battery capacity. Since the optimization object is confined by a set of short-term constraints and a long-term constraint, this problem is modeled as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). We leverage safe actor-critic (Safe-AC) to solve the CMDP. To satisfy the mixed constraints, the safe policy set of Safe-AC is induced by a Lyapunov function, thereafter, a policy distillation technology is leveraged to search the optimal policy. Experimental results indicate that our proposed scheme can strictly satisfy the propulsion energy cost budget requirement at the expense of around 2% loss of the reward compared to baseline methods.

Billions of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) collect sensitive data about people, creating data privacy risks and breach vulnerabilities. Accordingly, data privacy preservation is vital for sustaining the proliferation of IoT services. In particular, privacy-preserving IoT connects devices embedded with sensors and maintains the data privacy of people. However, common misconceptions exist among IoT researchers, service providers, and users about privacy-preserving IoT. This article refutes five common misconceptions about privacy-preserving IoT concerning data sensing and innovation, regulations, and privacy safeguards. For example, IoT users have a common misconception that no data collection is permitted in data privacy regulations. On the other hand, IoT service providers often think data privacy impedes IoT sensing and innovation. Addressing these misconceptions is essential for making progress in privacy-preserving IoT. This article refutes such common misconceptions using real-world experiments and online survey research. First, the experiments indicate that data privacy should not be perceived as an impediment in IoT but as an opportunity to increase customer retention and trust. Second, privacy-preserving IoT is not exclusively a regulatory problem but also a functional necessity that must be incorporated in the early stages of any IoT design. Third, people do not trust services that lack sufficient privacy measures. Fourth, conventional data security principles do not guarantee data privacy protection, and data privacy can be exposed even if data is securely stored. Fifth, IoT decentralization does not attain absolute privacy preservation.

In recent years, energy-efficient data collection has evolved into the core problem in the resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Different from existing data collection models in WSNs, we propose a collaborative data collection scheme based on optimal clustering to collect the sensed data in an energy-efficient and load-balanced manner. After dividing the data collection process into the intra-cluster data collection step and the inter-cluster data collection step, we model the optimal clustering problem as a separable convex optimization problem and solve it to obtain the analytical solutions of the optimal clustering size and the optimal data transmission radius. Then, we design a Cluster Heads (CHs)-linking algorithm based on the pseudo Hilbert curve to build a CH chain with the goal of collecting the compressed sensed data among CHs in an accumulative way. Furthermore, we also design a distributed cluster-constructing algorithm to construct the clusters around the virtual CHs in a distributed manner. The experimental results show that the proposed method not only reduces the total energy consumption and prolongs the network lifetime, but also effectively balances the distribution of energy consumption among CHs. By comparing it o the existing compression-based and non-compression-based data collection schemes, the average reductions of energy consumption are 17.9% and 67.9%, respectively. Furthermore, the average network lifetime extends no less than 20-times under the same comparison.