# Infrared-Assisted Temperature-Aware Backscatter Access for UAV-Enabled Geothermal Hotspot Sensing

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a UAV-based system that uses infrared sensing and backscatter communication to efficiently monitor geothermal hotspots by focusing on temperature-relevant data.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is a temperature-aware access scheme for UAV-enabled backscatter IoT networks that improves geothermal hotspot sensing efficiency.

## Key findings

- The temperature–energy-gated access increases packet success rates from hotspot regions.
- The system improves energy efficiency for geothermal monitoring compared to full activation.
- Hotspot-oriented metrics like effective throughput and task completion time are introduced and validated.

## Abstract

Geothermal exploration and monitoring often require dense temperature observations in terrains where wired networks are impractical and battery replacement for in situ sensors is costly. This paper proposes an infrared-assisted, temperature-aware access scheme for a UAV-enabled backscatter IoT network tailored to geothermal hotspot sensing. A rotary-wing UAV equipped with a thermal infrared camera and an RF transceiver first surveys the area to construct a surface temperature map and identify candidate hotspots, and then hovers above a selected hotspot to perform periodic frames consisting of wireless energy transfer followed by backscatter uplink collection. Ground sensors harvest RF energy, measure their local temperature, and autonomously activate only when both the harvested energy exceeds a threshold and the measured temperature falls within a target interval broadcast by the UAV, thereby concentrating channel access on thermally relevant nodes. We develop a system model that couples a geothermal-like thermal field, RF energy harvesting, and framed slotted backscatter access, and introduce hotspot-oriented performance metrics including effective hotspot throughput, task completion time, and energy per hotspot report. The simulation results show that the proposed temperature–energy-gated access significantly increases the fraction of successfully decoded packets originating from hotspot regions and improves the energy efficiency of geothermal monitoring compared with full activation and purely energy-based activation.