2012 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops
A Delay-based Routing Protocol for Human-oriented Delay Tolerant Mobile Sensor
Network (DTMSN)
Hui Zhao∗ , Ming Liu∗
∗ School
of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Email:jenniferzhao09@gmail.com,csmliu@uestc.edu.cn(corresponding author)
Abstract—With the vigorous development of IOT (Internet
of Things), sensor units carried by human beings will form the
largest DTMSN in the world. However, most of the existing
DTMSN routing protocols haven’t taken the characteristics
of human mobility into account, and may not work well in
human-oriented data gathering. In this paper, we analyze the
characteristics of human mobility, and propose a novel delay-
based routing protocol (DRP) for human-oriented DTMSN. In
DRP, a sensor node calculates the estimated data delivery delay
and takes it as a measure of the delivery capacity, the smaller
the estimated delay, the higher the delivery capacity of a sensor
node. When two nodes meet, data messages are forwarded to
the one with smaller estimated delay. To minimize transmission
overhead, DRP employs the message rank and survival time
to decide message’s transmission or dropping. We evaluate the
proposed scheme in a real human moving scenario provided
by MIT Reality datasets, which collected the traces of 100
individuals of MIT over the course of 9 months. Simulation
results have shown that the proposed DRP routing protocol
achieves a better performance than some other DTMSN data
gathering approaches.
Keywords-DTMSN,data gathering,data delivery delay,real
human mobility traces
I. I NTRODUCTION
Data gathering is the most important function of wire-
less sensor network (WSN). The traditional data gathering
schemes usually rely on a large number of densely deployed
sensor nodes to form a well connected mesh network.
Sensors in the network collect the target data and jointly
transmit them to the sink nodes. These schemes, however,
may not work well in the scenarios with poor connectivity
due to sparse network density and mobility of sensor nodes
(e.g., air quality monitoring [1], and wildlife tracking [2]). In
order to collect the data information in the aforementioned
scenarios effectively, Delay Tolerant Mobile Sensor Network
(DTMSN)[3] was proposed. A DTMSN generally consists
of two types of nodes, namely mobile sensor nodes and
sink nodes. The mobile sensor nodes which are intermittent
connected are attached to moving objects (such as human
beings, animals, or vehicles) for data information gathering,
while the sink nodes are either placed at special locations
or taken by mobile objects to collect data from sensors
and forward them to the end user. As the connectivity is
intermittent, a certain delay is tolerable in such networks.
1545-0678/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE 201
DOI 10.1109/ICDCSW.2012.108
One typical application of DTMSN is human-oriented
data gathering, in which the sensors collect the data which
are closely related to human body to achieve certain goal,
such as flu virus tracking to prevent the explosion of
devastating flu or air quality monitoring for tracking the
average toxic gas taken by people everyday [1]. In these
applications, although samples can be collected at specific
locations, the most accurate and effective way is deploying
wearable sensing units at human body, which generates large
scale human-oriented DTMSN. With the vigorous develop-
ment of IOT (Internet of Things), sensor units wearing by
human beings will form the largest DTMSN in the world.
Hence, it’s of great significance to design highly effective
routing protocol for such networks. Among the existing
DTMSN routing protocols, most of them [4], [5], [6], [7]
cannot adjust to the characteristics of DTMSN and work
poorly in data gathering. For example, due to the low data
deliver ratio in direct transmission [4] and the tremendous
amount of energy consumption in epidemic algorithms [5],
these two basic routing schemes work poorly in practical
scenarios. Although mitigating the energy expense, MaxProp
[6] and PREP [7], two variants of the epidemic protocol,
still have very high transmission overhead. RED [8] and
FAD [4] takes the characteristics of DTMSN into account
and make routing decisions based on historic records. They
achieve better routing performance compared with other
works, but their approach to predict delivery capacity is
error-prone, especially when the source is far away from
the sink; In addition, as they are not specially designed for
human-oriented DTMSN, they may not work well in human-
oriented scenario.
In this paper, we analyze the characteristic of human
mobility, and propose a novel delay-based routing protocol
(DRP) for human-oriented DTMSN. The major contributions
of our work lie in the following:
• We propose a new data gathering approach for human-
oriented DTMSN, which estimates the data transmis-
sion delay of a sensor node according to the history
records, and replicates messages selectively to nodes
that have lower estimated data delivery delay;
• We introduce an effective queue management scheme.
 According to this scheme, messages with too large
survival time should be dropped to make the full use
of network bandwidth and to reduce network energy
consumption;
• We use a real human moving scenario provided by
MIT Reality datasets [9] to simulate the proposed
protocol. Compared with the previous works which
assume that the nodes move randomly, our results are
more persuasive;
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Sec. 2 makes
a brief overview of related work. Sec.3 presents the network
model. Sec. 4 introduces the proposed DRP. Sec. 5 shows
the effectiveness of DRP via simulation. Sec. 6 concludes
the paper.
II. R ELATED WORK
Routing approaches in delay tolerant scenario have been
explored by many research groups. In [4], the authors present
a simple routing protocol for DTMSN, where data is only
allowed to be delivered when sensors are in direct proximity
of the sinks. That protocol has very little communication
overhead but much long delivery delay. In [5], Vahdat et
al. propose an epidemic routing protocol to increase the
data delivery ratio in partially connected networks. The
communication overhead here is quite high since too many
message copies are produced.
Apart from the most basic and simple routing schemes
mentioned above, many other approaches have been pro-
posed to address the data gathering problem in DTMSN.
The ZebraNet project [2] proposes a history-based strategy
for routing. The routing decision here is made according
to a sensor node’s past success rate of transmitting data
packets to the sink nodes directly. However, the data delivery
ratio is very low. Paper [4]also finds out that protocol fails
in delivering data messages generated by the sensor nodes
that are far away from the sink nodes. Other endeavors
aiming to enhance the performance of DTMSN routing
include paper [8], [4]. In [8], a replication based efficient
data delivery (RED) protocol is presented. RED consists of
two components: data delivery and message management.
Data delivery uses a history-based method as ZebraNet to
calculate the delivery probabilities of sensor nodes. Con-
cretely, let ξi denote the delivery probability of sensor i.
ξi is initialized with zero and increases upon an event of
message transmission while reducing with time expiration.
The message management algorithm decides the optimal
erasure coding parameters based on sensor’s current delivery
probability for improving the data delivery ratio. However,
the optimization of erasure coding parameters is usually
inaccurate because they are calculated according to the
current data delivery probability of source node, especially
when the source is very far away from the sinks. In addition,
propagating many small messages in the network may incur
further processing overhead and inefficiency of bandwidth
202
utilization. In [4], the authors propose a FAD protocol
to increase the data delivery ratio in DTMSN. Besides
using the same delivery probability calculation method as
RED, FAD further discusses how the replication of the data
over the sensor network can be constrained using a fault
tolerance value associated to each data message. However,
that protocol still has quite a high overhead.
In recent years, social structures have been exploited to
help routing in intermittently connected networks. In [10],
the authors utilize the communities formed by nodes in the
network for controlled flooding. They assume that nodes
mainly remain inside their community and sometimes visit
others. To route a message to a destination, a node may
forward that message to a node that belongs to the same
community as the destination. Their work provides a theo-
retical hypothesis for community based routing, but there is
not yet any empirical evaluation. In [11], the authors present
BUBBLE. According to this protocol, data messages should
be forwarded to the nodes which are more popular in the
networks, as the authors believe that the popular nodes have
more chances to deliver data successfully. The simulation
shows that this mechanism improves the performance of
routing in DTN obviously. In [12], Daly et al. present
the SimBet routing metric which is comprised of both a
node’s centrality and its social similarity. If the destination
node is unknown to the sending node or its contacts in
Simbet, the message is routed to a structurally more central
node where the potential of finding a suitable carrier is
dramatically increased. Simulation results demonstrate that
Simbet routing comes close in terms of performance to that
of epidemic protocol [5], without the additional overhead of
redundantly forwarding the message.
III. S YSTEM M ODEL
Definition3.1: A geographical region formed by some
sensor nodes moving within this scope for most of the time
is called a community.
We assume that one community consists of N number of
nodes and one sink node. A typical community is as shown
in Fig.1, in which the red triangle represents the sink node
and the black circles represent the sensor nodes. Moreover,
we further assume some additional characteristics in our
model.
• Sensor nodes are carried by human beings, and move
with their carriers;
• The sink node is located at a fixed place in its commu-
nity, and has no energy restriction;
• All the sensor nodes are loosely synchronized;
The community we define corresponds to the organized
human group in our society. It’s worth to note that, node
mobility model has a great impact on the performance of
a routing protocol[13], [14]. Among the existing mobility
model, the Random Mobility Model assumes that the nodes
move randomly, which obviously couldn’t reflect human

Community
Figure 1. network model
moving characteristics; the community-based mobility mod-
el [15], [16], [17] tries to abstract the characteristics of
human movements, but without a widely accepted standard
until now. In our network model, we do not constrain the
movements of nodes using any mobility model, and just
assume that they move as in a real circumstance.
IV. D ELAY BASED ROUTING P ROTOCOL
In human-oriented data gathering application, sensors are
carried by human beings, and data forwarding chances are
brought by human contacts. Thus, we will first analyze
the characteristics of human mobility before presenting our
routing protocol.
We notice that there is certain regularity and repeatability
in every person’s life. In [18], it is pointed out that 93%
of human mobility is predictable. The author did a survey
on the mobility of a phone user over the course of three
months, and the result is shown in Fig.2. The nodes represent
the locations visited by the user, and links represent the
observed movements between these locations. The uneven
node sizes, corresponding to the percentage of time the user
spent in the vicinity of the particular tower, indicate that
individuals tend to spend most of their time in a few main
locations. Furthermore, we observe in our life that during a
specified period of a day, one is usually attached to a certain
place, meeting almost the same people. For example, during
the working hours, one usually stays at the office, with
his/her most contacts occur with colleagues. Considering
these characteristics, the data delivery capacity of a node (a
person) could be predicted by the history records very well.
In this paper, we take the history average delivery delay as
an approximation of the estimated data delivery delay and
make routing decisions based on this value. The details on
routing protocol will be presented in the following part.
A. Data Transmission
1) Data delivery delay estimation: Data transmission
decision is made based on the estimated data delivery delay
of each sensor node at the moment, which indicates how
soon a sensor node could deliver a data message to the sink.
Obviously, it’s difficult for a sensor node to get the data
delivery delay without receiving acknowledgement from the
sink node. Therefore, we let the sink node broadcast a hello
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6% 5%
27%
52%
Figure 2. Visiting frequency of different places
message periodically, and use the receiving delay of each
hello message as an approximation of the data delivery
delay of a sensor node at different time point. As the
links are bidirectional, this approximation is reasonable.
The broadcasted hello message includes only two fields:
ID and GT, representing the message ID and its generation
time respectively. The nodes stays in direct proximity of
sink first receive the hello message, and then broadcast this
message in the whole community through contacts with
other nodes. Due to the intermittent connectivity of DTMSN,
each node receives the same hello message with different
delay. Whenever receiving a new hello message m (as is
determined by the ID), the node will calculate the current
delivery delay as follows:
Delay(i) = RT (m) − GT (m) (1)
Where GT (m) represents the generation time of m, and
RT (m) represents the receiving time of m by node i.
Then, the history average delivery delay of node i is
updated according to the following formula:
Avgdelay(i) = αDelay(i) + (1 − α)Avgdelay(i) (2)
Where α is a parameter which determines the percentage the
current delivery delay holds in estimating the data delivery
delay of node i.
As mentioned above, we use the history average delivery
delay to estimate the delivery delay at one moment, and
take it as the measure of delivery capacity, the smaller the
estimated delay, the higher the delivery capacity of a sensor
node.
2) Data transmission algorithm: Now we consider a
sensor i , which has a total number of N messages in
the data queue ready for transmission and is moving in-
to
∑ the communication range of a set of Z ′ sensors. Let
= Ψz |1 ≤ z ≤ Z represent the Z ′ nodes. Sensor i first
′
learns their current average transmission delay via simple
handshaking messages and then replicates all the messages
in its queue to a subset of the Z ′ sensors, which have lower
estimated delivery delay than that of node i. The pseudo-
code of the data transmission algorithm is shown as follows:
 Algorithm1.Message forwarding process
1: ϕ = 0
2: for z = 1; z <= Z ′ ; z + + do // identify receiving sensors
3: if Avgdelay(i) > Avgdelay(ψz ) then
4: ϕ=ϕ ∪ ψz
5: end if
6: end for
7: for n = 1; n <= |ϕ|; n + + do // |ϕ| represents the number
of nodes in ϕ
8: forwardmessage ( i, ϕn ) //ϕn for all n ∈ [1, |ϕ|]
9: end for
The data delivery process is shown in Fig.3. Suppose
that S1 → S2 → S3 → S4 → · · · → Sn is the path
along which the data messages are successfully forwarded
to the sink, where Si represents a sensor node carried by one
person. If we assume that the persons meeting each other
have a certain social relationship, then this path can be used
to represent a social relationship chain. In this chain, Sn
could communicate with the sink node directly, and it has
the lowest data delivery delay; while S1 is the furthest one
with respect to sink node, thus have the longest data delivery
delay. As is analyzed above, this social relationship changes
slowly, and this may also explain why we could use the
history average delivery delay to estimate the delivery delay
in the future.
Sn
S3 S4
Sink
S2
S1
Figure 3. Data delivery process
B. Queue management
1) Message’s rank & survival time: In opportunistic net-
works like DTMSN, multiple copies of the same messages
would be generated and buffered by different sensors, which
results in redundancy. The goal of the queue management
scheme is to determine message’s transmission order in
the buffer queue and to determine which message should
be dropped when the queue is full. The main idea of our
queue management scheme is to employ the rank as well as
survival time to signify the importance of a given message.
Each sensor has a data queue that contains data messages
ready for transmission. The data messages of a sensor come
from three sources. (a) After the sensor acquires data from
its sensing unit, it creates a data message, which is inserted
into its data queue; (b) When the sensor receives a data
message from other sensors, it inserts the message into its
data queue; (c) After the sensor sends out a data message to
a non-sink sensor node, it may also insert the message into
204
its own data queue again. Among these messages, we let
message of sort a have the highest rank, sort b medium, and
sort c the lowest rank. That is because messages of sort a
haven’t been transmitted, while that of sort b and sort c have
been transmitted, with a higher chance of being delivered to
the sink node.
Let Ci denotes the clock of sensor i and ξim be the survival
time of message m in the queue of sensor i. Recall that
in our network model, all the sensor nodes have loosely
synchronized clocks, thus, our strategy for determining a
message’s survival time is as follows: when a message is
generated, its survival time is initialized to be zero. Let’s
consider a sensor n, which is transmitting a data message
m to a nearby sensor node i. Since the propagation time
between two adjacent nodes with short distance could be
ignored, thus the initial value of ξim remains the same as
ξnm . If a source message has transmitted to its next hop and
it is inserted into node’s queue again, its survival time is
also assumed to be equal to the value before transmitting.
Furthermore, each sensor maintains a timer. Once the timer
timeouts, the message’s survival time increases. The general
operations are presented as Algorithm 2, where parameter
K denotes the maximum queue size of sensor.
Algorithm 2.Survival time updating
1: a[i] ← Ci ; // a[i] keep the current value of Ci
2: if receiving a new generated message m from node i
3: ξim =0
4: else
5: if receiving a message m form adjacent node n
6: ξim =ξnm
7: else
8: if receiving a transmitted message m from node i
9: ξim =ξim
10: endif
11: For( m = 1; m <= K; m + +) // m represent messages
maintained by sensor i
12: while m is in the queue of node i
13: ξim =ξim + +
14: endwhile
15: endfor
2) The implementation of queue management scheme:
The queue management scheme is based on both the rank
and the survival time of the message. We believe that
message of higher rank is more important and should be
forwarded with a higher priority. This is done by arranging
the messages in the queue with a decreasing order of their
rank. Furthermore, for messages with the same rank, priority
should be given to those messages that have smaller survival
time. A message will be dropped in the following two
occasions. First, if the queue is full when a message arrives,
its rank is compared with the message at the end of the
queue. If the rank is equal, but the new message has a larger
survival time, it is dropped. If the rank is equal, but the new
message has a smaller survival time, the message at the end
of the queue is dropped, and the new message is inserted
into the queue at appropriate position according to its rank
and survival time. If the rank of the new message is higher,
the message at the end of the queue is dropped, and the
new message is also inserted into the queue at appropriate
position. Second, once the survival time of a message in
the process of updating exceeds the network’s delay tolerant
threshold, the message is dropped. This is to reduce network
energy consumption, given that the message either has been
delivered to the sink node with a high probability by other
sensors or has been invalid in our application.
V. S IMULATION
We simulate and evaluate four protocols, including the
proposed DRP, FAD, direct transmission and epidemic in
a real human moving scenario provided by MIT Reality
datasets. FAD is one of the most influential DTMSN routing
protocols, while direct transmission and epidemic protocol
actually provide us with a performance baseline. We will
first introduce the datasets we use, and then compare the
performance among the four protocols and evaluate the
impact of different parameters.
A. Datasets introduction
Reality datasets collected the traces of 100 individuals
from MIT over the course of 9 months by letting each of
them carry a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. This phone
can record and timestamp the Bluetooth IDs encountered
as well as the cell tower ID providing services for it. As
the phones are carried by people, an encounter means a
communication opportunity in DTMSN. Moreover, we use
the static Bluetooth device frequently encountered by other
Bluetooth devices to represent the sink node in DTMSN.
Fig.4 is the friendship network generated through a survey
of the 100 individuals, which is clearly divided into two
cliques. This may be explained by the fact that: among the
100 individuals, seventy-five are either students or faculty
in the MIT Media Laboratory, while the remaining twenty-
five are incoming students at the MIT Sloan business school
adjacent to the Laboratory[4]. According to our network
model, one sink node is placed in one community for data
gathering, so we just consider the MIT Media Laboratory
community in our simulation, which includes 75 people. The
sink node is chosen to be the static device encountered most
frequently by these people.
B. Performance comparison
The performance metrics we use in our simulation are:
data delivery ratio, data delivery delay, and data delivery
overhead (represented by the average copies for each mes-
sage). The simulation parameters as well as their default
values are shown in Table 1. Moreover, as the performance
of FAD is influenced by the timer expiration value ∆ and
parameter α greatly, we adjust these two parameters to get
the close-to-optimal performance for fair comparison.
205
Figure 4. Friendship network in Reality Mining project
Table I
S IMULATION RESULTS WITH DEFAULT PARAMETERS
Parameter Default value
broadcast interval(minute) 6
Maximum queue size of sensor(message) 300
Size of data message(byte) 200
Size of hello message(byte) 10
Message generation rate (message/minute) 0.05
Network tolerant delay(minute) 1000
Initial energy of sensor node (joule) 10
α of DRP 0.6
We compare the performance of the four protocols under
the default parameters, and the results are presented in
Table 2. As we can see, the DRP protocol achieves a
higher data delivery ratio (90.7%) at relatively lower delivery
delay with nearly the same overhead as FAD. The direct
transmission protocol causes little overhead, but the delivery
ratio is extremely low. The epidemic protocol has the highest
overhead, however, the data delivery ratio is not as high as
it should be.
For DRP, it takes the estimation of data delivery delay
as a measure of delivery capacity, and data messages are
forwarded to the ones with lower estimated delay. To some
extent, it could guarantee that the data is delivered towards
the sink node step by step. Moreover, DRP employs the
message rank and survival time to decide message’s trans-
mission or dropping. The using of message ranks make sure
that new generated messages have more delivery chances;
The message survival time could eliminate the old enough
messages, which may have already been delivered to the
sink node, but still exhausts the network resources. For FAD,
the delivery probability of a sensor node is initialized with
zero and increases upon an event of message transmission
while reducing with time expiration. Due to the sparseness
and intermittent connectivity of DTMSN, the frequency of
encountering other sensor nodes or the sink node is very low,
thus, the transmission probability given by FAD could not
reflect the delivery capacity of a node very well. Regarding
Direct transmission, the sensor nodes can only transmit mes-
sages to the sink node directly, for sensors never reachable
to the sink node, their data messages will be lost forever,
thus the delivery ratio is very low. For epidemic protocol,
it produces a large amount of copies, which exhausts the
buffering resources rapidly, causing serious data dropping
phenomenon and low delivery ratio.
Table II
S IMULATION RESULTS WITH DEFAULT PARAMETERS
Protocol DRP FAD
Delivery ratio(%) 90.7 87.5
Average copies 6.1 6.2
Average delay(s) 525 623.1
C. Impact of network tolerant delay
This group of experiment illustrates the impact of the
network tolerant delay on the data delivery ratio of the four
protocols. The network tolerant delay indicates the survival
time of each message, and is represented by TTL (Time To
Live) here. As shown in Fig.5, while varying TTL from 200
100
90
80
70
Data delivery ratio
60
50
40
30
20
10
0 data messages, and the data messages have more chances
200 400 600
TTL
Figure 5. Impact of network tolerant delay
minutes to 1000 minutes, the data delivery ratios of the four
protocols are all improved. This is because longer survival
time means more chances to be delivered to the sink node
before being dropped. While the TTL is among 200 minutes
to 400 minutes, the data delivery ratios of the four protocols
are all very low, and epidemic outperforms the other three
protocols. This is because small TTL leads to frequent
message dropping and a great amount of messages are
dropped before being delivered to the sink node. In this case,
the queue sizes are adequate and epidemic could make every
chance to deliver data messages, thus it achieves the highest
delivery ratio. However, as the TTL continues increasing,
the number of survival messages increases obviously, and
the queue sizes become a scarce resource. As a result, the
epidemic protocol leads to serious buffer overflow, and its
data delivery ratio becomes lower than DRP and FAD. In
direct transmission, a sensor node could only transmit while
meeting the sink node, thus it has the lowest data delivery
ratio all the time. As the nodes in the datasets we use in
our simulation are very sparse, it may take one node a
long period to meet another node. To achieve an ideal data
delivery ratio, the survival time of data messages mustn’t be
too small. In our experiments, we set the network tolerant
delay as 1000 minutes, and the data delivery ratio of DRP
is nearly 90%.
D. Impact of broadcast interval
Fig.6 illustrates how the broadcast interval of hello mes-
DT Epedemic sage at the sink node affects our proposed protocol. As
46.4 76.1 shown in Fig.6, while the broadcast interval varies from 1
1.0 9.3
993.4 405.2
minute to 6 minutes, the data delivery ratio and delivery
delay of DRP have seen little changes, and the delivery
overhead decreases slightly with this varying. This is be-
cause the activities of human beings are stable, which means
that the delivery capacity of the sensor nodes carried by
human beings changes slowly. When the broadcast interval
is too small, some randomness might be brought and affect
the accuracy of the judgment on delivery capacity of a
node, which thus incurs more delivery overhead. Moreover,
a smaller broadcast interval of hello message will lead to
more extra overhead. Hence,we set the broadcast interval as
6 minutes in our simulation.
E. Impact of queue sizes
This group of experiment illustrates the impact of the
queue sizes on the performance of the four protocols. As
shown in Fig.7(a), with the growing of the queue sizes, the
DRP
FAD
data delivery ratio of the four protocols are all improved,
Epidemic this is because larger queue sizes could accommodate more
DT
800 1000
to be delivered to the sink node before they are dropped.
As seen from Fig.7(b), the average message copies of the
four protocols increases with the growing of the queue sizes,
this is also because large queue sizes could accommodate
more data messages. We find that DRP could control its
average message copies effectively. As shown in Fig.7(c),
with the increasing of the queue sizes, the data delivery
delay of the four protocols all increases. This is because
when the queue sizes increases, those messages with high
delivery delay have more chances to be delivered to the
sink node. Overall, at different buffer sizes, DRP outperform
direct transmission and epidemic obviously, and outperform
FAD in both delivery ratio and delivery delay.
F. Network life analyze
This group of experiment shows the lifetime of the
network using the four protocols. We assume that the energy
needed in each transmission and receiving is as specified in
[19], and the results are presented in Table 3. We assume the
network dies when half of the sensor nodes exhaust their en-
ergy. We can see that the direct transmission protocol enjoys
the longest network lifetime, since sensor doesn’t receive
and transmit any other messages except those generated by
the sensor itself, and thus much energy can be saved. The
epidemic protocol maintains the shortest network lifetime.
206
 100 10 600

80 8 500

Data delivery ratio(%)

Average copies

Average delay
60 6 400

40 4 300

20 2 200

0 0 100
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

Broadcast interval Broadcast interval Broadcast interval

(a) data delivery ratio (b) average copies (c) transmission delay

Figure 6. Impact of broadcast interval

100 15 1200

80 12 1000
DRP
Data delivery ratio(%)

FAD
Average copies

Average delay
60 9 800 Epidemic
DT

40 6 600
DRP
DRP FAD
FAD Epidemic
20 3 400
Epedemic DT
DT
0 0 200
100 200 300 400 500 600 100 200 300 400 500 600 100 200 300 400 500 600
Queue size Queue size Queue size

(a) data delivery ratio (b) average copies (c) transmission delay

Figure 7. Impact of queue sizes

This is because too many messages copies exhaust much
sensor energy in flooding. Moreover, we also obtain that
DRP attains longer network life than FAD, demonstrating
the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Though extra
energy is needed in DRP to disseminate the hello messages
broadcasted by the sink node, the total energy consumption
of DRP is a little less than FAD. This is because the size of
the hello message is very small and the broadcasting interval
does not need to be very short due to the stable human
activity.
N ETWORK LIFE WITH
Protocol
Lifetime
This paper focuses on the data gathering in human-
oriented DTMSN. After analyzing the unique characteristics
of human mobility, we propose a delay-based routing pro-
tocol (DRP) for human-oriented DTMSN. In DRP, the sink
node broadcasts a hello message periodically; each sensor
node calculates the estimated data delivery delay based on
the received hello message and takes it as a measure of
the delivery capacity. When two nodes meet, data messages
are forwarded to the one with smaller estimated delay. To
minimize transmission overhead, we introduce an effective
queue management scheme, which utilizes the message rank
and survival time to determine message’s transmission or
dropping. Finally, we evaluate the proposed scheme in a
real human moving scenario, and the results show that the
proposed DRP achieves a higher delivery ratio at lower
delivery delay with reasonable overhead.
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DEFAULT PARAMETERS
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DRP FAD DT Epedemic
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