Stochastic Geometry-based Analysis of Multi-Purpose UAVs for Package and Data Delivery

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of multi-purpose UAVs for simultaneous package delivery and data collection from IoT devices, employing stochastic geometry for system analysis and trajectory optimization.

Contribution

It introduces an algorithm for UAV trajectory optimization to enhance data transfer and delivery efficiency, considering energy constraints and network performance.

Findings

Multi-purpose UAVs can significantly improve communication and transportation efficiency.

The proposed algorithm effectively balances data collection/delivery and package transportation.

System performance is analyzed in terms of energy efficiency, data size, and delivery time.

Abstract

Using drones for communications and transportation is drawing great attention in many practical scenarios, such as package delivery and providing additional wireless coverage. However, the increasing demand for UAVs from industry and academia will cause aerial traffic conflicts in the future. This, in turn, motivates the idea of this paper: multi-purpose UAVs, acting as aerial wireless data relays and means of aerial transportation simultaneously, to deliver packages and data at the same time. This paper aims to analyze the feasibility of using drones to collect and deliver data from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to terrestrial base stations (TBSs) while delivering packages from warehouses to residential areas. We propose an algorithm to optimize the trajectory of UAVs to maximize the size of collected/delivered data while minimizing the total round trip time subject to the limited onboard battery of UAVs. Specifically, we use tools from stochastic geometry to model the locations of the IoT clusters and the TBSs and study the system performance with respect to energy efficiency, average size of collected/delivered data, and package delivery time. Our numerical results reveal that multi-functional UAVs have great potential to enhance the efficiency of both communication and transportation networks.