A Proposal of Sensor Data Collection System Using Mobile Relay Nodes

In recent years, as embedded devices become smaller, cheaper and more diverse, the demand for urban sensing systems that present valuable information to users is increasing. However, in achieving urban sensing systems, the communication channel from the sensors to the data centers pose a problem, especially in respect to the cost of furnishing IP/mobile networks for each and every one of the sensor nodes. Many existing researches attempt to tackle this problem, but they generally limit either the types of sensors used or the distances among the sensors. In this paper, we propose a new sensor data collection system model in which mobile relay nodes transport the sensor data to the data center. We ran simulations under conditions imitating the real world to verify the practicality of the proposed system. This simulation uses data accumulated from traffic surveys to closely imitate pedestrians in the real world. We evaluated that the proposed system has sufficient ability to use in urban sensing systems that are not under the real-time constraint.