Dependable Wildlife DTN: Wearable Animal Resource Optimization for Sustainable Long-Term Monitoring

Herein, we focus on an animal-to-animal data sharing mechanism in which wearable devices are attached to wild animals for performing environmental monitoring based on delay tolerant networking technology. This system enables long-term environmental monitoring in difficult-to-access areas, such as wild environments outside power and communication infrastructures. This mechanism transfers data sensed by animal-wearable sensors through multi-hop transfer between wild animals. To maintain such a system, considering the lifespan of the animals is necessary (dependability problem). Further, considering long-term operation, the evaluation period used in existing studies (only the first three years after monitoring began) is inappropriate in terms of accuracy in a computer simulation because the simulation then requires spin-up time. Therefore, as a contribution of the present work, we obtain new information by changing the evaluation time of the simulation in the third year. Our experimental results show that the animal carrier input model used herein, which differs from existing research models, recorded the highest number of encounters. Thus, we have solved the problem of the long-term operation of environmental monitoring, which is important in terms of the dependability of the animal-to-animal data sharing mechanism.