Internet of Flying Things (IoFT): A Survey

Abstract

[EN] Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently received significant attention by the civilian and military community, mostly due to the fast growth of UAV technologies supported by wireless communications and networking. UAVs can be used to improve the efficiency and performance of the Internet of Things (IoT) in terms of connectivity, coverage, reliability, stability, etc. In particular, to support IoT applications in an efficient manner, UAVs should be organized as a Flying Ad-hoc NETwork (FANET). FANET is a subclass of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) where nodes are Unmanned Artifact Systems (UAS). However, the deployment of UAVs in IoT is limited by several constraints, such as limited resource capacity of UAVs and ground devices, signal collision and interference, intermittent availability of the IoT infrastructure, etc. In the Internet of Flying Things (IoFT) literature, there are no survey or study that exhaustively covers and discusses all key concepts and recent works on IoFT. In this paper a comprehensive survey on the IoFT is presented, covering the state of the art in flying things with a focus on IoFT. A taxonomy of related literature on IoFT is proposed, including a classification, description and comparative study of different work on IoFT. Furthermore, the paper presents IoFT applications, IoFT challenges and future perspectives. This survey aims to provide the basic concepts and a complete overview of the recent studies on IoFT for the scientific researchers.