Movement-Aware Relay Selection for Delay-Tolerant Information Dissemination in Wildlife Tracking and Monitoring Applications

As a promising use-case of the Internet of Things (IoT), wildlife tracking and monitoring applications greatly benefit the ecology-related research both commercially and scientifically. In literature, a forward-wait-deliver strategy has been researched to facilitate energy-efficient dissemination of delay-tolerant information, which penitentially contributes to long-term tracking and monitoring. However, this strategy is not directly applicable for wildlife tracking and monitoring applications, as the movement trajectory of animals cannot be precisely predicted for relay selection. To this end, further studies are required to utilize partially predictable mobility based on more generalized navigational information such as the movement direction. In this paper, the feasible exploitation of directional movement in path-unconstrained mobility is investigated for strategic forwarding. Our proposal is an advance to the state-of-the-art because the directional correlation of destination movement is considered to dynamically exploit the node mobility for the optimal selection of a stationary relay. Simulation results show that higher delivery utility can be achieved by the proposed fuzzy path model compared with a forwarding scheme without contact prediction or one based on linear trajectory model.