A neighbor collaboration mechanism for mobile crowd sensing in opportunistic networks

Data collection from a crowd of mobile devices is an essential building block of emerging mobile sensing systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient information diffusion protocol for sensor data collection via an opportunistic network. The proposed method detects groups of pedestrians based on the history of radio connectivity between the nodes and maintains a local network (i.e., a cluster) among the detected group members. By collaboratively performing neighbor discovery and link management with the cluster members, it enhances energy-efficiency of the neighbor discovery and minimizes the information delivery delay. Simulation results show that the proposed method can improve the message delivery performance by 16%–83% with equivalent contact probing intervals.