Mobile Sampling of Sensor Field Data Using Controlled Broadcast

Mobile objects can be used to gather samples from a sensor field. Civilian vehicles or even human beings equipped with proper wireless communication devices can be used as mobile sinks that retrieve sensor-data from sampling points within a large sensor field. A key challenge is how to gather the sensor data in a manner that is energy efficient with respect to the sensor nodes that serve as sources of the sensor data. In this paper, an algorithmic technique called Band-based Directional Broadcast is introduced to control the direction of broadcasts that originate from sensor nodes.