Road condition gathering with vehicular DTN

More and more vehicles are equipped with various types of sensors, and can be exploited as mobile sensors to monitor the road conditions. To quickly gather road condition information of an urban area, by exploiting both scarce contact resource in the vehicular DTN and patrol vehicles, this paper proposes a novel compressive sensing (CS) based urban monitoring scheme, called CS-Monitoring. We propose a novel data structure and an aggregation method that can take advantage of the random and opportunistic vehicle encounters to naturally form the measurement matrix which is critical to CS. Based on a set of aggregate messages gathered, we also propose a CS-based event recovery algorithm and a patrol vehicle guidance algorithm to guide the patrol vehicles to go and sense the non-monitoring hole. Our results from extensive simulations demonstrate that CS-Monitoring allows urban monitoring center to quickly obtain the full context data with high accuracy and low message cost.