Opportunistic Data Mules for Short Delay Smart City Applications

Collecting data from sensors integrated in objects spread across smart city streets and delivering them to central controllers is a challenging issue in realizing smart cities. Using vehicles as data mules has proved its effectiveness in addressing this issue. However, the urban mobility constraints lead to high collection latency which does not suite all kinds of smart city scenarios. We propose a data collection scheme that leverages opportunistic inter-vehicular communications to provide each road segment by a data mule. This allows to increase the distribution degree of the collection process and thus to reduce the collection latency. The simulation in realistic mobility settings shows that our scheme insures adequate distribution of data mules in the area of interest within bounded delay.