An IoT-Assisted Efficient Framework for Multi-Drone Conveyance System

In the near future, a multi-drone conveyance system will be an invaluable asset for meeting a variety of local and lightweight transportation needs. Recent research has focused extensively on the design and development of efficient multi-drone conveyance systems. However, the majority of these works rely on centralized cloud-based support, which is significantly susceptible to various single-point-of-failure-related issues. In this paper, a distributed IoT-assisted framework for multi-drone transportation is proposed. However, a successful distributed implementation of the system requires extensive coordination between its various components. Particularly, the drones need to tightly collaborate with the stations where they can temporarily halt for charging, referred to as Charging and Resting Stations (CRS). In this paper, we propose utilizing recent advancements in Synchronous-Transmission (ST)-based communication strategies to realize a fast and energy-efficient communication backbone for multi-drone transportation systems. Through the implementation of a simple dynamic path planning strategy, we demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the implementation of the multi-drone system using conventional communication strategies in terms of delivery time and reliability. In addition, we demonstrate that the strategy not only handles random conveyance assignments efficiently but also fairly distributes the load across the CRSs.