Delay-Tolerant Networking for Long-Term Animal Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hardware and software framework for delay-tolerant networking to enable long-term animal tracking, addressing energy, connectivity, and accessibility challenges in mobile wildlife monitoring.

Contribution

The paper presents a multi-tier architecture combining low-energy devices and cloud services for robust, adaptive data collection and remote reconfiguration in animal tracking applications.

Findings

Successful multi-year deployment on flying foxes

Effective data collection despite intermittent connectivity

Adaptive sensing and remote reconfiguration capabilities

Abstract

Enabling Internet connectivity for mobile objects that do not have a permanent home or regular movements is a challenge due to their varying energy budget, intermittent wireless connectivity, and inaccessibility. We present a hardware and software framework that offers robust data collection, adaptive execution of sensing tasks, and flexible remote reconfiguration of devices deployed on nomadic mobile objects such as animals. The framework addresses the overall complexity through a multi-tier architecture with low tier devices operating on a tight energy harvesting budget and high tier cloud services offering seamless delay-tolerant presentation of data to end users. Based on our multi-year experience of applying this framework to animal tracking and monitoring applications, we present the main challenges that we have encountered, the design of software building blocks that address these challenges, and examples of the data we collected on flying foxes.