Halo: Managing Node Rendezvous in Opportunistic Sensor Networks

One vision of an opportunistic sensor network (OSN) uses sensor access points (SAPs) to assign mobile sensors with sensing tasks submitted by applications that could be running anywhere. Tasked mobile sensors might upload sensed data back to these applications via subsequent encounters with this SAP tier. In a people-centric OSN, node mobility is uncontrolled and the architecture relies on opportunistic rendezvous between human-carried sensors and SAPs to provide tasking/uploading opportunities. However, in many reasonable scenarios application queries have a degree of time sensitivity such that the sensing target must be sampled and/or the resulting sensed data must be uploaded within a certain time window to be of greatest value. Halo efficiently, in terms of packet overhead and mobile sensor energy, provides improved delay performance in OSNs by: (i) managing tasking/uploading opportunity, and (ii) using mobility-informed scheduling at the SAP.