Towards the Use of Commercial Flights for Data Collection in Wide White Area Networks

Abstract : Wide white areas are defined as large regions with little or no infrastructure such as deserts or large forest areas. Indeed, strategic phenomena and activities take place in these areas which necessitate data collection and analysis. However, the difficulty of access and the vastness of wide white area make the deployment of such networks hard and inefficient. In this work, we propose a new approach which aims at efficiently collecting data from networks deployed in wide white areas. The goal of our method is to improve data collection efficiency by maximizing the amount of the collected data. The proposed method uses commercial flights to collect data while they cross over an area of interest. We investigate the feasibility of such a scheme by determining the collection capacity of commercial aircrafts in different locations of the desert.