Offloading Data through Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Dependability Evaluation

Abstract

Applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) context continuously generate large amounts of data. The data must be processed and monitored to allow rapid decision making. However, the wireless connection that links such devices to remote servers can lead to data loss. Thus, new forms of a connection must be explored to ensure the system’s availability and reliability as a whole. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly empowered in terms of processing power and autonomy. UAVs can be used as a bridge between IoT devices and remote servers, such as edge or cloud computing. UAVs can collect data from mobile devices and process them, if possible. If there is no processing power in the UAV, the data are sent and processed on servers at the edge or in the cloud. Data offloading throughout UAVs is a reality today, but one with many challenges, mainly due to unavailability constraints. This work proposes stochastic Petri net (SPN) models and reliability block diagrams (RBDs) to evaluate a distributed architecture, with UAVs focusing on the system’s availability and reliability. Among the various existing methodologies, stochastic Petri nets (SPN) provide models that represent complex systems with different characteristics. UAVs are used to route data from IoT devices to the edge or the cloud through a base station. The base station receives data from UAVs and retransmits them to the cloud. The data are processed in the cloud, and the responses are returned to the IoT devices. A sensitivity analysis through Design of Experiments (DoE) showed key points of improvement for the base model, which was enhanced. A numerical analysis indicated the components with the most significant impact on availability. For example, the cloud proved to be a very relevant component for the availability of the architecture. The final results could prove the effectiveness of improving the base model. The present work can help system architects develop distributed architectures with more optimized UAVs and low evaluation costs.