# Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Enabled IoT Platform for Disaster Management
## 1 Introduction  
The forests and wild-land in British Columbia (BC) cover more than 94 million hectares and they are the most diverse in Canada. There are approximately 8000 wildfires on average each year throughout Canada and an average of 2000 wildfires only in BC [1]. In the aftermath of disasters such as wildfires, information dissemination to and from citizens and authorities often involves the use of mobile network services to seek help, distribute critical information, and possibly to confirm the safety. The traffic on the cellular network typically increases substantially because of disaster. Therefore, efficient and reliable systems are required that can detect and monitor the fire as well as send notifications to the users as soon as possible. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an important paradigm that has opened a promising door towards catering to multitude of problems (such as transportation, health, disaster management,etc.) in an efficient and reliable way [2]. IoT devices are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and communicate to enable communication among physical objects [3]. IoT aims to offer optimal connectivity that can be used in monitoring, controlling and automation of reliable access of users. Recently, IoT based platforms are considered for the disaster management [4]. In context of wildfire disaster, it is extremely important to detect the wildfire and its exact location, as well as early notification to the fire units and users is essential. An efficient IoT platform for wildfire management is expected to lead to major social, economic, and environmental impacts in society. However, IoT platform for disaster management needs memory efficient, robust, and reliable communication among IoT devices. Further, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are recently investigated as flying wireless communication platforms [5]. UAVs can be used as relays to extend the coverage and improve connectivity of ground IoT network. On the contrary, UAVs can also be used as base station to provide connectivity to ground IoT network [6]. Compared to the conventional cellular network, UAVs can provide connectivity in areas where the infrastructure is damaged or there is no existing communication infrastructure. Therefore, UAVs can provide solution to collect data from the ground IoT network in the area with limited or no infrastructure. This integration of UAVs and ground IoT network can enhance the ability to efficiently predict, access and respond to wildfire. It will also significantly reduce the response time during disaster management resulting in saving the lives of people in the affected areas [5]. The rules and regulations for UAVs are different depending on the country. However, special permissions are generally granted for the use of UAVs to help first responders in disaster situations. A UAV-enabled IoT platform can work as an effective tool for wildfire services to improve wildfire management at reduced cost. However, it is important to involve all the stakeholders including the government and people to determine the requirements for fire management. BC wildfire services has spent approximately $568 million in 2017 [7]. Therefore, it is important to investigate the UAV-enabled IoT platform for wildfire management. There are several strategies proposed in the literature for UAV-enabled disaster management. In a pre-disaster phase, when the conventional network is fully operational, UAVs are mainly deployed to collect data from ground IoT network and acquire data using onboard sensors such as aerial footage and imagery for remote surveillance. For example, UAVs are deployed for real-time mountain fire monitoring in [8]. In [9], images of disaster-hit area are taken using UAVs for image stitching. Moreover, UAVs are deployed to locate survivors [10]. In [11], UAVs are used to collect data from sensors and to forward it to the cloud for further processing in real time. During and post disaster, where a part of traditional network infrastructure is damaged, UAVs can also serve as a permanent data relay.