Cross-Network Opportunistic Collection of Urgent Data in Wireless Sensor Networks

Ubiquitous smart environments equipped with low-cost and easily-deployable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and ever-increasing widespread Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are opening brand new opportunities in environmental monitoring. This paper proposes an original solution for WSN/MANET integration based on the primary design guideline of opportunistically exploiting MANET overlays impromptu formed over the WSN to improve and boost the data collection task of a typical WSN. On the one hand, we adopt a cross-layer approach that exploits MANET connections to differentiate and fasten the delivery of sensed urgent data by pushing them over low-latency MANET paths. On the other hand, we take advantage of local cross-layer visibility of the WSN data collection procedures and protocols to carefully control and limit WSN–MANET coordination overhead. We claim that our proposed solution can obtain significant quality of service improvements via differentiation, by granting faster delivery times to urgent data with a very limited cost in most common execution scenarios.