Resource Aware Information Collection (RAIC) in Ad hoc Networks

In an ad hoc network it may be necessary for a single node to collect information about the local or global state of the network and the devices contained within it. This information may be used in network management, resource and service discovery, and routing protocols. Given ad hoc network constraints, this process of information collection must be efficient, scalable and distributed. Unlike sensor networks, sensing in an ad hoc network is of secondary importance and therefore should introduce as little overhead as possible. This paper introduces Resource Aware Information Collection (RAIC). RAIC is a distributed, two phase (setup and capture), resource aware approach to sensing the state of an ad hoc network from a source node (sink). An optimised flooding mechanism is used to both disseminate sensor request messages and setup a backbone of suitable nodes to relay replies back to the sink. RAIC compared to Directed Diffusion and Direct Response consumes less energy and introduces less overhead (received and transmitted messages) when performing a query of the network. We show that in an energy and user constrained environment, it is possible when querying the network to extend its lifetime. This is achieved by accounting for node resources (during setup and capture), thereby distributing the load of relaying to nodes most suitable. This allows RAIC to perform significantly more queries while reducing the load of sensing. RAIC is able to collect information from over 90% of the network up to 262 queries compared to 28 queries for Directed Diffusion and 5 queries for Direct Response.