Seal-2-Seal: A delay-tolerant protocol for contact logging in wildlife monitoring sensor networks

Sensor networks are now enabling the monitoring of various environmental phenomena with more accuracy than the previous labour intensive and less technological solutions. This paper is concerned with the application of opportunistic networking techniques to wildlife monitoring, where the sensors are attached to animals moving in their habitat. We present seal-2-seal, a novel protocol for logging of node (i.e., animal) contacts in mobile networks and for dissemination of that information to sinks for further analysis. The protocol utilises an efficient data summary mechanism to reduce the amount of information that needs to be transmitted, thus reducing energy consumption. To evaluate the performance of the protocol, we implemented it for the Contiki operating system on sensor devices and ran simulations based on real-life mobility traces using the Cooja emulator.