Drone-Enabled Internet-of-Things Relay for Environmental Monitoring in Remote Areas Without Public Networks

Advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to the revolutionary potential to achieve intelligent environmental monitoring. However, extreme conditions across hard-to-reach areas, where public ground networks do not provide sufficient coverage, have resulted in the difficult backhaul of monitoring data from remote areas of interest. Because of the urgent demand for low-cost data collection in such areas, this article proposes a novel drone-enabled IoT relay system to provide high-speed data collection to support remote environmental monitoring. The high-speed ability of 5-GHz communication technology was exploited to reduce the time required for data transmission between ground monitoring devices and drone. Meanwhile, the long-range (LoRa) technology, as a low-power and long-distance wireless communication technology, is adopted as a wake-up strategy for waking up the high-power 5-GHz module. Based on 5 GHz and LoRa technology, a drone-based onboard relay and ground intelligent terminal are designed. An application is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the designed system. Numerous real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of the designed drone-enabled IoT relay system and show its capability for high-speed data collection. The field experiments demonstrate that the system collects cached data with a stable 3.5-MB/s throughput at an altitude of 140 m. The breakthroughs in the drone-enabled IoT relay facilitate intelligent environmental monitoring in remote areas without public networks and provide a new perspective on data backhaul over areas of interest.