Cross-Network Opportunistic Collection of Urgent Data in Wireless Sensor Networks

Ubiquitous smart environments equipped with low-cost and easily-deployable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and ever-increasing widespread Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are opening brand new opportunities in environmental monitoring. This paper proposes an original solution for WSN/MANET integration based on the primary design guideline of opportunistically exploiting MANET overlays impromptu formed over the WSN to improve and boost the data collection task of a typical WSN. On the one hand, we adopt a cross-layer approach that exploits MANET connections to differentiate and fasten the delivery of sensed urgent data by pushing them over low-latency MANET paths. On the other hand, we take advantage of local cross-layer visibility of the WSN data collection procedures and protocols to carefully control and limit WSN-MANET coordination overhead. We claim that our proposed solution can obtain significant quality of service improvements via differentiation, by granting faster delivery times to urgent data with a very limited cost in most common execution scenarios.