UAV-Aided trustworthy data collection in federated-WSN-enabled IoT applications

Abstract In emerging applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually federally deployed for these purposes of data gathering, tracking and monitoring. Under the universal WSN architecture, a mass of collected data will be converged on deployed sinks. Therefore, reasonable solutions for sink deployment must be achieved to optimally operate federated-WSN-enabled IoT applications. To address this issue, the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) acting as mobile sinks is investigated, in which a new concept of ‘great full-coverage subgraph’ with the most complete connectivity is introduced to generate candidate areas for deploying UAVs. Thereby, the investigation is transformed into solving a traditional K-center problem formulated as a multi-objective joint optimization with multiple constraints. Subsequently, to address serious security vulnerabilities on UAV-aided trustworthy data collection, a lightweight authority authentication model using specific procedures is investigated to enforce the data collection session to be conducted only by both trusted sensors and UAVs with an acceptable authentication delay. Finally, numerical analysis and evaluation results are shown to demonstrate efficiencies of investigations.