Delay Tolerant Networking for Smart City Through Drones

Sensors in future smart cities will continuously monitor the environment in order to prevent critical situations and waste of resources or to offer new services to end users. Likely, the existing networks will not be able to sustain such a traffic without huge investments in the telecommunication infrastructure. One possible solution to overcome these problems is to apply the Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) paradigm, that is to exploit the movement of objects, possibly carrying data toward the final destination. Depending on location of data sources in the area and on paths followed by moving objects some sources could be isolated. In order to fix this issue, we use a drone, flying at proper instant of time over the isolated sources to deliver their data to the final destination. The impact of the presence of a drone as relay of the DTN is investigated accounting for realistic constraints, such as limited drone flight duration.