A field experience on DTN-based sensor data gathering in agricultural scenarios

This paper describes our field experience on data collection from remote sensors. By letting tractors, farmers and sensors have short-range radio communication device with delay-disruption tolerant networking (DTN), we can collect data from those remote sensors to our central database. Although, several implementations have been made by using PHS devices or mesh network in the past, DTN-based systems for such applications are still under explored. The main contribution of this paper is to present our practical implementation and experiences on DTN-based data collection from remote sensors. The software, which we have developed for this research, is very small - only about 3000 lines in C, which is much smaller than any other DTN implementations. We carried out an experiment with 10 DTN nodes in the University of Tokyo. They achieved 100% collection with moderate delivery latency showing sufficient usefulness in data granularity.