Design and Analysis of Delay-Tolerant Sensor Networks for Monitoring and Tracking Free-Roaming Animals

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the design and analysis of delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) deployed for free-roaming animal monitoring, wherein information is either transmitted or carried to static access-points by the animals whose movement is assumed to be random. Specifically, in such mobility-aided applications where routing is performed in a store-carry-anddrop manner, limited buffer capacity of a carrier node plays a critical role, and data loss due to buffer overflow heavily depends on access-point density. Driven by this fact, our focus in this paper is on providing sufficient conditions on accesspoint density that limit the likelihood of buffer overflow. We first derive sufficient access-point density conditions that ensure that the data loss rates are statistically guaranteed to be below a given threshold. Then, we evaluate and validate the derived theoretical results through comparison with both synthetic and real-world data.