Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2022.3218674

Using drones for communications and transportation is drawing great attention in many practical scenarios, such as package delivery and providing additional wireless coverage. However, the increasing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from industry and academia will cause aerial traffic conflicts in the future. This, in turn, motivates the idea of this article: multipurpose UAVs, acting as aerial wireless data relays and means of aerial transportation simultaneously, to deliver packages and data at the same time. This article aims to analyze the feasibility of using drones to collect and deliver data from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to terrestrial base stations (TBSs) while delivering packages from warehouses to residential areas. We propose an algorithm to optimize the trajectory of UAVs to maximize the size of collected/delivered data while minimizing the total round trip time subject to the limited onboard battery of UAVs. Specifically, we use tools from stochastic geometry to model the locations of the IoT clusters and the TBSs and study the system performance with respect to energy efficiency, average size of collected/delivered data, and package delivery time. Our numerical results reveal that multifunctional UAVs have great potential to enhance the efficiency of both communication and transportation networks.