Particle Swarm Optimization-based ThrowBox Deployment Scheme for Mobile Delay Tolerant Networks

Crowdsensing is a new paradigm which exploits the mobile phones to collect data with a low cost. The primitive data is used to analyze and get valuable information for us. The underlying networks of the crowdsensing system is the mobile delay tolerant networks (MDTNs). In MDTNs, how to transmit the collected data to the datacenter is key issue due to the lack of rich contact opportunities, especially for the large-scale coverage area. Deployment of additional stationary throwboxes can provide more contact opportunities, thus improve the efficiency of data delivery. In this paper, we investigate where to deploy throwboxes in the throwbox-assisted MDTNs. The mathematical model with the maximum coverage is built at the fixed number of nodes, and uses the particle swarm optimization (PSO) to solve the model to get the optimal coverage solution. The simulation results show our proposal can improve 14% area coverage rate than no PSO optimization scheme under the same condition.