Delay/Fault-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Network (DFT-MSN): A New Paradigm for Pervasive Information Gathering

This paper focuses on the delay/fault-tolerant mobile sensor network (DFT-MSN) for pervasive information gathering. We develop simple and efficient data delivery schemes tailored for DFT-MSN, which has several unique characteristics, such as sensor mobility, loose connectivity, fault tolerability, delay tolerability, and buffer limit. We first study two basic approaches, namely, direct transmission and flooding. We analyze their performance by using queuing theory and statistics. Based on the analytic results that show the trade-off between data delivery delay/ratio and transmission overhead, we introduce an optimized flooding scheme that minimizes transmission overhead in flooding. Then, we propose two simple and effective DFT-MSN data delivery schemes, namely, the replication-based efficient data delivery scheme (RED) and the message fault tolerance-based adaptive data delivery scheme (FAD). The RED scheme utilizes the erasure coding technology in order to achieve the desired data delivery ratio with minimum overhead. It consists of two key components for data transmission and message management. The former makes the decision on when and where to transmit data messages according to the delivery probability, which is the likelihood that a sensor can deliver data messages to the sink. The latter decides the optimal erasure coding parameters (including the number of data blocks and the needed redundancy) based on its current delivery probability. The FAD scheme employs the message fault tolerance, which indicates the importance of the messages. The decisions on message transmission and dropping are made based on fault tolerance for minimizing transmission overhead. The system parameters are carefully tuned on the basis of thorough analyses to optimize network performance. Extensive simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. Our results show that both schemes achieve a high message delivery ratio with acceptable delay. The RED scheme results in lower complexity in message and queue management, while the FAD scheme has a lower message transmission overhead.