Opportunistic Networking for Sensor Data Collection in Urban Environment

In this paper we present the preliminary results from a work dealing with opportunistic networking in urban context. In particular we consider a set of sensors deployed in a city center, aimed at sampling e.g. environmental parameters. Such sensors then opportunistically exploit the urban vehicular mobility to transfer their measurements to one of data fusion centers, located at chosen points in the city. Both the sensor nodes and the vehicles are equipped with radio transceivers having a fixed transmission range and data storage capability (which is assumed to be limited). Here we present simulations based study conducted in the particular case of the city of Seattle, WA, since we had access to the actual mobility traces of the city bus fleet, collected by [1]. Some of the performance metrics that can be evaluated in our simulator environment are the delivery rate of packets originated from each sensor node, the statistics of the transport delay and the fraction of packet drops due to limited storage buffer capability. We also highlight the role played by the number of sensors and fusion centers, and the effect of transmitting power. Possible extensions of this preliminary work include comparison to the results obtained when using (theoretical and measured) mobility traces.