UAV Mission Planning Method for Internet of Things Data Collection: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT), serving as a critical infrastructure in the information age, holds significant value for enhancing perception efficiency and decision-making accuracy. However, in scenarios with suboptimal communication networks, data collection can become a bottleneck in the implementation of IoT applications. Given their convenience and flexibility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as hopeful solutions to enhance IoT data collection capabilities. This paper focuses on summarizing the challenges and strategies associated with UAV mission planning. Firstly, we classify and introduce typical application scenarios. Building upon these scenarios, we explore the interaction mechanisms between UAVs and IoT devices (IoTDs), along with the benefits of clustering-based interactions in four distinct settings. Additionally, we summarize the main advancements in current research, encompassing planning entities, fundamental mathematical models, data collection modalities, mission planning objectives, and optimization algorithms. Finally, we outline four representative research trends in UAV-enabled IoT data collection.