Micro-level urban sensing through mobile data gathering with bus and SDMA technique

With the rapid development of urbanization, traditional urban sensing approaches cannot be sufficient to meet the growing demand of people. To achieve a highly reliable and stable urban sensing network, we propose a micro-level urban sensing schema. Participatory sensing and vehicle sensing are not suitable for this kind of network due to the active participation, the opportunistic or the deployment cost. In our schema, information is collected in a quite small scale by making full use of the existing sensing equipment and deploying a number of wireless distributed nodes. Buses equipped with data processor collect and process the sensing information. Since the reliability and stability of network depends on the energy consumption, the spatial-division multiple access (SDMA) technique is introduced to shorten transmission time in order to reduce sensor energy consumption. We apply linear decorrelator strategy of SDMA technique to reduce sensor energy consumption by equipping each bus station node and bus with dual antenna. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the traditional approaches in reducing the energy consumption and then improving the reliability and stability to some extent.