Opportunistic Dissemination and Harvesting of Urban Monitoring Information in Vehicular Sensor Networks

Abstract — The recent advances in vehicular communications make possible and push towards the realization of vehicular sensor networks, i.e., collaborative environments where mobile vehicles equipped with sensors of different nature (from toxic detectors to still/video cameras) interwork to implement moni-toring applications. In particular, there is an increasing interest in proactive urban monitoring where vehicles continuously sense events from urban streets, autonomously process sensed data, e.g., recognizing license plates, and possibly route messages to vehicles in their vicinity to achieve a common goal, e.g., to permit police agents to track the movements of specified cars. This challenging environment requires novel specific solutions: differently from more traditional wireless sensor nodes, vehicles exhibit constrained mobility, usually have no strict limits on processing power and storage capabilities, and host sensors tha