Congestion Aware Data Collection with Mobile Sinks in Smart City

Smart city is an important application of Internet of Things (IoT). To meet the requirements of smart city, efficient mechanisms are needed to deliver data from IoT sensors to data centers for processing. Vehicular networks based data collection approach is both cost effective and energy efficient. However, in high traffic scenario, it leads to high delays. This work leverages the high vehicular density to improve the collaborative mobile sinks data collection scheme. Indeed, dedicated vehicles that embed mobile sinks, designate among citizen cars that move on/towards congested roads, opportunistic and temporary sinks to collect data from encountered IoT sensors. We describe, in this solution, the selection strategy of temporary mobile sinks and we show the proposed data collection scheme. Simulations in realistic mobility setting demonstrate that our scheme outperforms its peer in terms of data collection latency and ratio of successful IoT objects coverage. Indeed, our scheme can target 96 percent of IoT sensors while only 43 percent is reached by its peer in the same amount of time.