Data delivery in wireless sensor networks with uncontrollable mobile nodes

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of low-powered devices that have computation, wireless communication and environment-sensing capabilities. These low-cost sensors are usually deployed in a dense and stationary manner for the periodic sensing of environmental phenomena. WSNs open the door for many monitoring applications in the military, in healthcare, and in environmental and urban studies. mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) are a subclass of WSNs in which some or all the sensors are mobile. Many environmental applications are designed and deployed on top of MWSNs in which the sensors' hosts are uncontrolled by end users (e.g., the OpenSense project for air pollution monitoring in the city of Zurich).MWSNsposes many challenges for newly designed applications. In this paper, we evaluateMWSNswith a location-based application. We test various data delivery schemes used by sensors in MWSNs, including GPRS, Wi-Fi, and Hybrid (both GPRS and Wi-Fi). We perform extensive simulation-based experiments using the ns2 simulator.