Neighborhood changing rate: an unifying parameter to charaterize and evaluate data dissemination scenarios

Vehicular sensor networks are emerging as a new network paradigm particularly relevant to proactive monitoring of urban environment. In this mobile environment, each sensor can generate a large amount of data which must be reliably reported to actuator agents. Data dissemination in conjunction with efficient harvesting has proven to be very effective in this type of applications. One major property in data dissemination/ harvesting is the ability of a node to discover new neighbors as it moves. The performance depends on many different parameters including speed, motion pattern, node density, data rate, transmission range. This multitude makes it difficult to accurately evaluate and compare data gathering protocols implemented, for example, on different simulation or testbed scenarios. In this paper, we introduce Neighborhood Changing Rate (NCR) - a parameter that cumulatively captures the essence of several other parameters relevant to data dissemination. By its intrinsic property, the NCR measure can well characterize a dissemination/harvesting scenario and allow to predict the performance of such scenario. We illustrate our approach by applying the NCR concept to Mobeyes, a lightweight data gathering protocol.