Contact Strategy for VDTN Data Collection in Smart Cities

The number of connected devices will increase exponentially in the coming years, emitting a massive amount of data to the networks. A vehicle-based data collection architecture for smart cities will enable the offloading of some data for delay-tolerant applications. However, our previous work showed the diversity in data pick-up pattern by vehicles based on location in the city. Build on those findings this paper introduces a preliminary study on a contact strategy for wireless sensors data collection utilizing Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTN) in smart cities. The strategy formulates relation between mutual communications range, vehicle's speed, and periodic discovery time by the sensor. We then propose sensor's buffer occupancy value as a measure for the adaptation of its communications discovery period, with the purpose of reducing energy consumption.