Demo: Platform for Collecting Data From Urban Sensors Using Vehicular Networking

Abstract

A large-scale urban sensing platform, composed of multiple Data Collection Units (DCUs) equipped with sensor hardware scattered accross the city, allows pervasive monitoring of environmental parameters. Gathering sensor data from a number of disparate locations at a backend server can be supported by delay-tolerant services provided by existing vehicular networks. Our real-world sensing platform takes advantage of an existing vehicular network with more than 400 vehicles equipped with On-Board Units (OBUs). A purposely-developed implementation of a delay tolerant service is installed in all elements involved in the communication flow, from DCUs to the backend server. In this demo, we showcase the full end-to-end data flow with the actual equipment being used in our real-world deployment. Data produced at a DCU is collected by an OBU installed in a vehicle and delivered to a Road-Side Unit (RSU), which then forwards the data to the backend server.