Urbihoc: a delay tolerant approach for data acquisition in urban areas using a mobile wireless sensor network

Abstract

In recent years several pieces of research have proposed the use of wireless mobile nodes to sense a wide diversity of phenomena in urban areas. Data collected by mobile sensors are typically sent to a central server in order to be shared with other users through cellular or WiFi networks. Unfortunately, the cost of deploying and maintaining such infrastructure may be prohibitively high. Furthermore, a disaster situation on the server side may cause the failure of the whole system. As an alternative approach, in this work we introduce Urbihoc, a data acquisition method that uses opportunistic transmissions to directly share data among mobile nodes. In this way, from local exchanges, Urbihoc builds up global knowledge about a monitored phenomenon. Our results suggest that, in some applications, it is possible to monitor a phenomenon over a large metropolitan area by using only the resources contributed by mobile users.