Wireless Powering Internet of Things with UAVs: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper reviews the integration of UAVs and wireless power transfer to enable IoT deployment in remote areas, discussing challenges, technologies, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of UAV-enabled wireless powering for IoT, highlighting current challenges, enabling technologies, and future research opportunities.

Findings

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of enabling technologies.

Ue-WPIoT can extend IoT applications to remote areas.

Discussion of open issues and future directions.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to overcome the deployment constraint of Internet of Things (IoT) in remote or rural area. Wirelessly powered communications (WPC) can address the battery limitation of IoT devices through transferring wireless power to IoT devices. The integration of UAVs and WPC, namely UAV-enabled Wireless Powering IoT (Ue-WPIoT) can greatly extend the IoT applications from cities to remote or rural areas. In this article, we present a state-of-the-art overview of Ue-WPIoT by first illustrating the working flow of Ue-WPIoT and discussing the challenges. We then introduce the enabling technologies in realizing Ue-WPIoT. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the enabling technologies in Ue-WPIoT. We finally outline the future directions and open issues.