Unstable Path Routing in Urban-Scale WSN

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) may suffer from congestion at the nodes near the sink, and partition due to the failure of crucial nodes. In urban environments, mobile devices, such as vehicles and smart phones, present in the vicinity of the sensor field could be opportunistically used for data forwarding. Such devices, controlled by third parties, introduce paths that may appear for only very small intervals. This paper discusses how exploiting such unstable paths to shift the routing-related processing and communication load to more capable mobile devices can alleviate traffic congestion, improve fault tolerance and reduce WSN energy consumption