Data Dissemination in Mobile Phone Sensor Networks

Deploying sensors over large areas is costly in terms of configuration, hardware, and maintenance. Using onboard sensors of today mobile phones can significantly reduce the expenses in monitoring areas and disseminating events or data. Via the available short-range Bluetooth and/or WiFi interfaces, measured data are not only gradually delivered, but also possibly more reliable. In our simulation, existing Delay-Tolerant Network routing algorithms show poor performance on a complex network comprising diverse kinds of sensor nodes, such as, mobile phones, cars, and road side units. New approaches that can perform well on such heterogeneous networks are needed. They also need to support exchanging measurements among sensors for more accurate inference. In the early phase, we set up a heterogeneous architecture composed of different sorts of sensors, and propose an algorithm, Unified routing, for routing and disseminating. A further variant of the scheme is being developed. Early simulation results are consistent with theoretical prediction. After finishing the firs step, Unified routing, the focus of our research will be on distributed data processing. Finally, routing and distributed data processing will be investigated in a testbed in a realistic context.