SCAR: Context-aware Adaptive Routing in Delay Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks

Sensor devices are being embedded in all sorts of items including vehicles, furniture but also animal and human bodies through health monitors and tagging techniques. The collection of the information generated by these devices is a challenging task as the data results in enormous amounts and the sensors have scarce resources (especially in terms of energy for the forwarding of the data). Fortunately, the data is often delay tolerant and its delivery to the sinks is, in most cases, not time critical.

This paper tackles the problem of the delivery of mobile sensor data to sinks. We devise a Sensor Context-Aware Routing protocol (SCAR), which exploits movement and resource prediction techniques to smartly forward data towards the right direction at any point in time. In order to cope with the possibly frequent sensor faults, we also adopt a multi-path routing approach which increases the reliability.