Collecting Sensed Data with Opportunistic Networks: The Case of Contact Information Overhead

Abstract

Abstract:The rising human population in urban environments drives the mission towards smart cities, which envisions a wide deployment of sensors in order to improve the quality of living. In this regard, opportunistic networks (OppNets) present an economical means of collecting delay tolerant data from sensors to their respective gateways for providing various Smart City services. Due to the distributed nature of the network, encounter-based routing protocols achieve acceptable throughput by requiring nodes to exchange and update contact information on an encounter basis. Unfortunately, sufficient insight into the associated overhead is lacking in the literature. Hence, we contribute by modelling contact information overhead and investigating its impact on OppNet routing, particularly in terms of data exchange success and energy consumption on portable handheld devices. Our findings reveal that the expected contact information overhead in Smart City scenarios significantly reduces data exchange success and increases energy consumption on portable handheld devices, thereby threatening the feasibility of the technology. We address this issue by proposing an algorithm that can be incorporated into encounter-based routing protocols to reduce contact information overhead without compromising throughput. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm reduces the average contact information overhead, increases throughput and reduces average energy consumption.

Optimising data diffusion while reducing local resources consumption in Opportunistic Mobile Crowdsensing

“…Specifically, Song et al [4] propose the use of MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETwork) or Device-to-Device (D2D) networking, through the communication and sharing of crowdsensing data by vehicles near the event (such as a pothole on the road), termed as a local crowd. Some researchers have already proposed the use of Opportunistic Networking (also referred to as Opportunistic Networks) to collect and broadcast sensed data [31,32]. Thus, OppNet can serve as a complementary technology to avoid or minimise the use of fixed infrastructure, as well as to offload it.…”

The Impact of Message Replication on the Performance of Opportunistic Networks for Sensed Data Collection

“…Phase 1 introduces PoiTrace [73], a mechanism that maintains region-based information from which the most significant locations visited by a node can be inferred. User movement may reveal multiple significant locations and can be exploited for routing.…”

Addressing the Issue of Routing Unfairness in Opportunistic Backhaul Networks for Collecting Sensed Data

“…Phase 1 introduces PoiUtility, which is elaborated in [72]. U a (d) ∈ [−∞, 1], the PoiUtility of a node a for a destination d, is given by Equation (1), where E a (d) and L a (d) represent the encounter-based and location-based forwarding utilities, respectively, and the constants µ and ω are non-negative parameters of the forwarding utility, such that µ ω and their sum equals 1.…”