A Motion Tendency-Based Adaptive Data Delivery Scheme for Delay Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks

The delay tolerant mobile sensor network (DTMSN) is a new type of sensor network for pervasive information gathering. Although similar to conventional sensor networks in hardware components, DTMSN owns some unique characteristics such as sensor mobility, intermittent connectivity, etc. Therefore, traditional data gathering methods can not be applied to DTMSN. In this paper, we propose an efficient motion tendency-based data delivery scheme (MTAD) tailored for DTMSN. By using sink broadcast instead of GPS, MTAD obtains the information about the nodal motion tendency with small overhead. The information can then be used to evaluate the node´s effective delivery ability and provide guidance for message transmission. MTAD also employs the message survival time to effectively manage message queues. Our simulation results show that, compared with other DTMSN data delivering approaches, MTAD achieves not only a relatively longer network lifetime but also a higher message delivery ratio with lower transmission overhead and data delivery delay.