Multi-hop data forwarding method for crowd sensing networks

The integration of sensing and mobile computing devices has led to the evolution of crowd sensing networks (CSNs). The widespread usage of built-in sensors in mobile devices that are carried by people on a daily basis provides new opportunities for gathering information that can be used in numerous large-scale applications. In most applications for CSNs, opportunistic users want to avoid consuming their own resources if there is no sufficient incentive. Therefore, we need to develop an energy-efficient multi-hop data forwarding method to deliver the sensory data generated by opportunistic users to participatory users. In this study, we present a multi-hop data forwarding method for use in CSNs to facilitate environmental monitoring applications. We use IEEE 802.15.4 to save the battery energy of opportunistic users. The proposed method is based on dynamic source routing (DSR). However, utilizing DSR over IEEE 802.15.4 leads to packet fragmentation, which degrades the network performance, because the header grows as a function of the route length in DSR and due to the limited packet size of IEEE 802.15.4. Therefore, we propose a multi-hop data forwarding method to reduce the header overheads. The novel feature of this method is the abbreviation of an intermediate node’s address. In our evaluation, we estimated the fragmentation ratio and our results showed that the fragmentation ratio of the proposed method remained relatively stable compared with other methods, even as the volume of data increased. The network performance is efficient and effective in terms of the latency and delivery ratio.