Fetching Ecosystem Monitoring Data in Extreme Areas via a Drone-Enabled Internet of Remote Things

Ecosystem monitoring involves fully understanding the complex interactions of ecosystem progress and providing massive scientific data to answer research questions. Fetching data in extreme areas without a public network largely relies on human efforts. Along with the ongoing advances of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Remote Things (IoRT), as a new paradigm, is being pursued. In this article, we improve the previous drone-enabled IoRT system and innovatively integrate the system with ecological monitoring devices for wildlife, phenology and environmental monitoring, and the monitored data are remotely retrieved by drones. The experimental results indicate that the data transmission rate between the drone relay and the terrestrial terminal reaches up to 10–15 MB/s. Experiments further demonstrate that in terms of wildlife monitoring, the required time to retrieve an image cached on a terrestrial terminal is approximately 0.35 s, the time required to transfer a set of phenology data is 0.29 and 0.34 s, and in regard to environmental monitoring data, the average time consumption reaches approximately 0.0302 s. Moreover, we introduce a signal strength-based priority strategy that can reduce the time consumption of data transmission between the drone relay and the terrestrial terminal. The demonstrated applications reveal that monitoring devices deployed in remote extreme regions can be connected in the IoRT network, and the way to retrieve data from these deployed devices is being revolutionized by the drone-enabled IoRT network.