Asynchronous Dual Radio Opportunistic Beacon Network Protocol for Wildlife Monitoring System

Currently there are several technologies such as opportunistic wireless sensor networks deployed to monitor wildlife. Due to network complexity and lack of full connectivity, the collected data is often either saved on internal memory for later off-line data transfer or relayed to sink nodes. In this paper, however, we introduce an asynchronous dual interface opportunistic beacon network for animal monitoring. Unlike conventional opportunistic networks which are based on multi-copy data replication techniques, our approach utilizes an optimized single-copy beacon data transmission to achieve high energy efficiency. Furthermore, the collected data is aggregated and relayed to the central system by leveraging a low power and long range radio to provide high connectivity coverage. This approach will allow to facilitate ultra-low power IoT devices to be deployed for sustainable wildlife monitoring applications. We evaluate the proposed approach in an actual animal movement use-case scenario. The results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the traditional opportunistic networks in-terms of energy consumption and packet delivery ratio.