A coverage-based drop-policy in wireless sensor network with disruptive connections

Many applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consider remote and large scale monitoring. For those scenarios, the whole network is difficultly fully connected all the time. A possible vision is the union of WSNs and Disruptive Tolerant Network(DTNs) concepts, where mobile nodes make collect data in sparse networks and deliver them to a base station. This work presents a buffer management strategy, which is a basic principle in DTN networks. The proposed solution considers the global coverage to choose which messages are dropped, therefore, minimizing the impact on monitoring application. Such solutions are important for WSNs applications with limited resources. We show through simulation that the proposed Coverage-Based Drop-Policy in Wireless Sensor Network with Disruptive Connections (CBDP) improves the network coverage compared to traditional DTN drop policies like Drop Last Packet (DL) and Drop First Packet (DF).