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Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represent a significant aid on scenarios where fixed, ground infrastructures are temporarily or permanently not available; this is the case of large-scale applications of the Internet of Things (IoTs), e.g. smart city and agriculture 3.0, where the UAVs can be employed as mobile data mules and gather the data from Wireless Ground Sensors (WGSs). UAV-aided wireless sensor networks (WSNs) introduce considerable advantages both in terms of performance and costs since they avoid the need of error-prone multi-hop communications, and also the installation of static gateways; at the same time, they pose formidable research challenges for their implementation, like the synchronization issue between the UAV and the WGS and the path planning, which should take into account the extremely limited flight autonomy of the UAVs. In this paper, we address both the issues …