Low-Altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles-Based Internet of Things Services: Comprehensive Survey and Future Perspectives

TLDR

Unmanned aerial vehicles are rapidly gaining attention and are expected to be deployed worldwide, offering high‑mobility services such as delivery, farming, and rescue, and poised to become a key enabler of the Internet of Things, but their adoption faces technical, regulatory, privacy, and communication challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of UAVs and related issues and proposes an envisioned UAV‑based architecture for delivering value‑added IoT services from the sky. The proposed architecture integrates UAVs equipped with machine‑type communication devices to provide IoT services, and the paper outlines the key challenges and requirements for its implementation.

Abstract

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have attracted a lot of attention, since they represent a new potential market. Along with the maturity of the technology and relevant regulations, a worldwide deployment of these UAVs is expected. Thanks to the high mobility of drones, they can be used to provide a lot of applications, such as service delivery, pollution mitigation, farming, and in the rescue operations. Due to its ubiquitous usability, the UAV will play an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, and it may become the main key enabler of this vision. While these UAVs would be deployed for specific objectives (e.g., service delivery), they can be, at the same time, used to offer new IoT value-added services when they are equipped with suitable and remotely controllable machine type communications (MTCs) devices (i.e., sensors, cameras, and actuators). However, deploying UAVs for the envisioned purposes cannot be done before overcoming the relevant challenging issues. These challenges comprise not only technical issues, such as physical collision, but also regulation issues as this nascent technology could be associated with problems like breaking the privacy of people or even use it for illegal operations like drug smuggling. Providing the communication to UAVs is another challenging issue facing the deployment of this technology. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the UAVs and the related issues will be introduced. In addition, our envisioned UAV-based architecture for the delivery of UAV-based value-added IoT services from the sky will be introduced, and the relevant key challenges and requirements will be presented.