A novel protocol for adaptive broadcasting of sensor data in urban scenarios

In a number of sensing applications users are only interested in the data relevant to their present location and current type. This paper presents a novel distributed and low-power protocol that allows mobile users, while moving around the deployed stationary sensor networks, access data from the sensors in their vicinity. As users acknowledge the data, sensors use these acknowledges as a statistical basis to estimate users´ mobility. Sensors dynamically adjust their broadcast rate based on estimated users´ mobility pattern. To evaluate the performance of our protocol, we use a well-grounded and realistic pedestrian mobility models to generate the user movement patterns and a realistic radio model. Our approach does not require any additional hardware or does not assume any control over user´s mobility. We analyzed the performance of the proposed protocol for a single sensor and network consisting of 10 sensors. The results show a decrease in power consumption by a factor of 2x to 8x (single sensor) and 2x to 16x (10 node sensor network) when compared to the existing protocols.