Collaborative Smart Environmental Monitoring Using Flying Edge Intelligence

Abstract

Smart environmental monitoring is crucial for public health and ecological balance as it enables us to monitor and react to environmental hazards. However, effective environmental monitoring can be hindered by the lack of infrastructure and high monetary costs. These challenges are even more pronounced in remote areas, where networking and energy sources are often limited or nonexistent. To address these challenges, we utilize UAVs to form a FANET which can provide effective communication infrastructure suitable for environment monitoring. Moreover, we utilize Edge Intelligence at these UAVs to increase the processing speed and reduce the data size that needs to be transmitted. Our results show that, compared to statically placed gateways, our solution is able to attain similar average age of information for monitoring results while also significantly increasing system capacity. Index Terms—Flying Edge Intelligence, Age of Information, Smart Environmental Monitoring, Flying Ad-Hoc Networks, Value of Information