A MAC transmission strategy in sparse Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks that lack telecommunication infrastructure, vehicular sensors may experience the following severe connectivity issues: sparse and intermittent connectivity, long and variable delays, high latency, high error rates, highly asymmetric data rates, and lack of end-to-end connectivity. The MAC layer can make use of this connectivity problem and play an important role in solving data throughput efficiency, energy conservation and different service issues in sparse Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Sensor Networks (VDTSN). In this paper we propose an efficient transmission strategy in the MAC layer which coordinates the working procedure of vehicular sinks and ordinary sensors. We also designed three transmission algorithms for different quality requirements of data, with energy conservation considerations in one contact interval. Transmission power consumption and data throughput are the main measurements used to evaluate transmission efficiency performance. We compare and analyse our scheme with two other important MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks in throughput, delay, energy consumption etc. The simulation results show that the strategy performs the transmission of different types of data more effectively in an energy-saving and data-throughput-balanced way than other MAC approaches in sparse VDTSN.