Recoverability-Aware Fault-Tolerant Scheduling of UAVs for IoT Data Collection in Disaster Scenarios

Reliable data collection is essential for disaster-oriented Internet of Things (IoT) systems, where damaged terrestrial communication infrastructure often leaves sensed data buffered at disconnected end devices. In Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Internet of Things device (IoTD) collaborative data collection, random UAV faults and limited energy and buffer resources further complicate mission execution, making fault-tolerant scheduling crucial for robust data recovery. To address these issues, a unified framework is developed by integrating dynamic UAV reliability modeling, Maximum Distance Separable (MDS)-coded fault-tolerant backup, and collaborative scheduling optimization. Within this framework, a data fault-tolerance mechanism, termed MFTB, and a bilevel collaborative scheduling algorithm, termed LP-DCFS, are proposed. Simulation results indicate that, in the evaluated scenarios, the proposed methods achieve better overall performance than the considered baselines. In a representative high-load, high-failure scenario, MFTB reduces data loss by 4.8% and 37.5% compared with Buffer-Limited Retransmission (BLR) and Replication, respectively, while LP-DCFS increases the amount of recovered data by 33.9%, 32.3%, and 53.1% compared with ACEPSO, ADE-DMRM, and DQN, respectively. Under the modeled independent random crash and non-return faults and the evaluated simulation settings, these results suggest that coordinating failure-risk characterization, data-protection mechanisms, and task-scheduling strategies can improve the robustness and data-recovery capability of disaster-oriented UAV-assisted data collection.