Joint resource scheduling and flight path planning of UAV-assisted IoTs in response to emergencies

In unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)-assisted Internet of Things (IoT), emergencies can lead to changes in the status of ground sensor networks. This necessitates UAV-assisted IoT systems to possess the capability to dynamically respond to changes in the status of the ground sensor network. Therefore, this paper proposes a UAV scheduling scheme based on regional coordination (USRC). In this scheme, we divide the ground sensor network into task sub-regions according to the deployment of base stations. Then, we introduce a scheduling relationship pairing algorithm to determine the scheduling relationships between task sub-regions and UAV resources that need to be scheduled for each sub-region. Based on this, a dynamic path planning algorithm is designed to synchronize the planning of cross-region flight paths and intra-region flight paths for UAVs. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme can efficiently respond to changes in the status of the ground sensor network by scheduling UAVs from sub-regions with abundant resources to those with scarce resources. Compared to other schemes, our scheme exhibits superior performance in reducing the age of information (AoI) and packet loss rate.