Ferry-based Architecture for Participatory sensing

The concept of Participatory Sensing is centered on individuals that collect data using their smart phones (or other dedicated devices) to track the evolution of their work/living places. The main objective is to use the gathered data in order to enhance the offered quality of life. To maximize people involvement in this process we propose a ferry based architecture to leverage the contributors from charges associated with accessing service providers infrastructure to forward collected data. Opportunistic contact with message ferries will be exploited to gather data that will be carried from ferry-to-ferry till it reaches a centralized processing and decision-taking authority. We provide a closed formula for the End-to-End throughput of the proposed gathering network architecture.