Delay-Tolerant Networking for Long-Term Animal Tracking

Enabling Internet connectivity for mobile objects that do not have a permanent home or regular movements is a challenge due to their varying energy budget, intermittent wireless connectivity, and inaccessibility. We present a hardware and software framework that offers robust data collection, adaptive execution of sensing tasks, and flexible remote reconfiguration of devices deployed on nomadic mobile objects such as animals. The framework addresses the overall complexity through a multitier architecture with low-tier devices operating on a tight energy-harvesting budget and high-tier cloud services offering seamless delay-tolerant presentation of data to end users. Based on our multiyear experience of applying this framework to animal tracking and monitoring applications, we present the main challenges that we have encountered, the design of software building blocks that address these challenges, and examples of the data we collected on flying foxes.