DGDP: Data Gathering and Dissemination Protocol in urban environment

A Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a fundamental component of Internet of Things (IoT) for data collection. However, sensors are limited in terms of energy and transmission range which can lead to reduce the network’s lifetime and the loss of collected information in urban environment. Motivated by the need to ensure information delivery, maximize network’s lifetime and minimize the transmission latency, the proposed protocol (DGDP) enhances the performance of WSN by exploiting the presence of vehicles in urban area. DGDP builds the best quality path from sensor to the base station (BS) based on the specific characteristics of nodes determining its ability to relay messages efficiently in the network. We conduct intensive simulation in data collection phase and data dissemination phase under several scenarios with different densities of sensors and vehicles using Omnet++. The simulation results reveal that the proposed data collection strategy maintains the coverage of the network and minimize the network’s load. The integration of vehicles network in the process of data collection and dissemination leads to save the network’s energy and consequently extends its lifetime. The proposed scheme for data dissemination allows 75% of vehicles to participate in the dissemination of data in the network.