3558 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 13, NO.

10, OCTOBER 2013

Convergence of MANET and WSN in
IoT Urban Scenarios
Paolo Bellavista, Senior Member, IEEE, Giuseppe Cardone, Member, IEEE,
Antonio Corradi, Member, IEEE, and Luca Foschini, Member, IEEE
AbstractUbiquitous smart environments, equipped with low-
cost and easy-deployable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and
widespread mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), are opening
brand new opportunities in wide-scale urban monitoring. Indeed,
MANET and WSN convergence paves the way for the devel-
opment of brand new Internet of Things (IoT) communication
platforms with a high potential for a wide range of applications
in different domains. Urban data collection, i.e., the harvesting of
monitoring data sensed by a large number of collaborating sen-
sors, is a challenging task because of many open technical issues,
from typical WSN limitations (bandwidth, energy, delivery time,
etc.) to the lack of widespread WSN data collection standards,
needed for practical deployment in existing and upcoming IoT
scenarios. In particular, effective collection is crucial for classes
of smart city services that require a timely delivery of urgent data
such as environmental monitoring, homeland security, and city
surveillance. After surveying the existing WSN interoperability
efforts for urban sensing, this paper proposes an original solution
to integrate and opportunistically exploit MANET overlays,
impromptu, and collaboratively formed over WSNs, to boost
urban data harvesting in IoT. Overlays are used to dynamically
differentiate and fasten the delivery of urgent sensed data over
low-latency MANET paths by integrating with latest emergent
standards/specications for WSN data collection. The reported
experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness (e.g.,
limited coordination overhead) of the proposed solution.
Index TermsMobile ad hoc networks, routing protocols,
wireless sensor networks.
I. INTRODUCTION
D
URING the last decade, several research efforts have
investigated emergent Internet of Things (IoT) applica-
tion scenarios, where heterogeneous devices, spanning from
smart-phones and wireless sensors, up to network-enabled
physical objects (e.g., RFID, smart visual tags, etc.), could
seamlessly interoperate in globally integrated communications
platforms [1][3]. The recent emergence of smart cities,
envisioned as intelligent, wide-scale, and open environments
able to facilitate citizens by increasing their everyday quality
of life, is further boosting research in IoT technologies and
Manuscript received January 31, 2013; revised June 18, 2013; accepted
June 29, 2013. Date of publication July 3, 2013; date of current version
August 21, 2013. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper
and approving it for publication was Dr. Honggang Wang.
The authors are with the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, University of Bologna, Bologna 40136, Italy (e-mail:
paolo.bellavista@unibo.it; giuseppe.cardone@unibo.it; antonio.corradi@
unibo.it; luca.foschini@unibo.it).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JSEN.2013.2272099
related standards as a fundamental building block for these
new scenarios.
Toward such a perspective, there is the need to continu-
ously collect, elaborate, and present data, possibly deriving
from smart objects and integrated with participatory sensing:
that activity requires signicant standardization efforts, under
different perspectives, to deal with dynamic, open, and not
statically predictable deployment conditions. A relevant goal
is to devise new, autonomic, and adaptable services for smart
cities, which may span several different application domains,
from environmental and habitability monitoring (noise/light
pollution, vehicle trafc, etc.), to security controlling (anti-
theft protection, structural monitoring to prevent collapses of
old buildings and bridges, etc.), and to assist citizenship urban
living and roaming (elderly assistance services, emergency
response, etc.) [4].
Recent advances in wireless communications and mobile
devices are opening these new services through novel integra-
tion opportunities. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), namely
networks consisting of tiny inexpensive autonomous devices
equipped with sensors, can take measurements, locally store,
handle sensed data, and can communicate to each other. At
the same time, last-decade progresses in ad-hoc wireless tech-
nologies have enabled Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs),
where it is possible to build impromptu connections without
predened xed infrastructures. By using a unique sentence,
while WSNs are networks of things, MANETs are networks
of people: they are dynamically formed and allow people in
a restricted area to send, receive, and share data, without the
need of either infrastructure or centralized support.
It is widely recognized that WSNs and MANETs are key
technologies for several IoT application domains in smart
cities [5]: their suitability is also boosted by their localized
and self-conguring capabilities, which can enable easier
large-scale deployments. In addition to academic interest,
market research shows that many municipalities will soon
adopt WSNs and MANETs, mainly for public safety, local-
ization, and environmental monitoring [6]: a notable example
is the Republic of Korea, which has recently invested in
WSN-related technologies to provide a wide range of ser-
vices/applications to citizens, spanning from environmental
monitoring to trafc management and entertainment [7].
Very recently, mobile phones, already equipped with multi-
ple wireless interfaces (IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, and 3G), have
started hosting onboard also low-power connectivity solutions,
such as IEEE 802.15.4; moreover, low-power connectivity
1530-437X 2013 IEEE
BELLAVISTA et al.: CONVERGENCE OF MANET AND WSN IN IoT URBAN SCENARIOS 3559
TABLE I
LOW POWER STANDARD PROTOCOLS AND THEIR MAIN FEATURES
is expected to become available on most consumer devices
in the near future [8]. Based on these recent advances that
catalyze ongoing standardization efforts (as detailed in the
following), we propose opportunistic exploitation of MANETs
to speed up WSN data collection while MANET nodes (relays)
roam in a smart city WSN. Moreover, the MANET-WSN
integration adds exibility to stand-alone WSNs, because it
can be dynamically activated only for specic classes of WSN
trafc, for example data labeled by source nodes as urgent.
Note that, differently from other approaches in literature, our
relays are neither mobile harvesters that convey sensed data to
the Internet, nor mobile WSN users only: instead, our proposal
fully exploits the interaction opportunities enabled by standard
protocols to opportunistically merge WSNs and MANETs,
thus enabling cross-network routing with low latency, as
requested by specic subsets of sensed data that is ltered
at routing time.
For example, let us consider a monitoring application tar-
geted at the structural integrity of buildings, with WSN nodes
deployed for data collection purposes over different city areas,
like roads, buildings, and bridges. When one critical event is
detected (e.g., a dangerous exure of a column), the monitor-
ing application should trigger an alert to be delivered faster
than other normal sensor readings to WSN data collection
points. It is important to note that packet latency over WSNs
typically depends on the number of routing hops and on
duty cycling of sensor nodes, which may periodically turn
off their radio transceivers to save energy at the cost of higher
latency. Our primary idea is to reduce the delivery time of only
most relevant urgent data without sacricing battery lifetime,
by dynamically pushing urgent alerts over a MANET-based
overlay. That alleviates two main WSN communication issues:
scarcity of energy and low communication bit rate. In fact,
even if MANET devices often have limited computing power,
their constraints are of orders of magnitude weaker than the
WSN ones, and their communication interfaces have a much
higher bit rate. Therefore, WSNs and MANETs can mutually
benet from each other.
Let us stress that the IoT vision has recently further exac-
erbated the need of standardization for interoperability, espe-
cially for the widespread deployment and economic success
of city-wide MANET and WSN technologies. About MANET
realizations, the IEEE 802.11 standard is largely dominant and
is demonstrating to allow excellent interoperability between
heterogeneous devices. Instead, for WSNs the standardization
efforts have not produced yet a widely accepted solution stack.
Thus, as discussed in the following section, nowadays it is
crucial to provide market stakeholders with strong evidences of
standardization directions/progress and interoperability levels
achieved by heterogeneous devices, to demonstrate the eco-
nomic soundness of the industrial production of both WSN
nodes and smartphones with low-power wireless interfaces.
II. STANDARDIZATION NEEDS AND DIRECTIONS
In order to transform WSN (and WSN-MANET integration)
into a viable technology to make the IoT vision cost-effective
and deployable, we claim the need of middleware-layer solu-
tions fully compliant with accepted standards (or largely
adopted specications).
About hardware-related standards, a central element is to
provide smartphones with low-power wireless interfaces for
WSN connectivity in order to enable WSN-MANET inter-
working with limited costs. About software-related standards,
they mainly focus on packet routing and high-level network
management and work on enabling interoperability and inte-
gration between WSNs and mobile devices. In this eld
currently there are several competing proposals: the most
prominent ones are Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE),
Developers Alliance for Standards Harmonization of ISO
18000-7 (DASH7), IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and
lossy networks (RPL), and ZigBee [9][12]. Table 1 summa-
rizes their most important features: each protocol is targeted at
specic niches and, as a consequence, has a different balance
in the tradeoff between coverage range, data rate, and routing
support.
3560 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 13, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2013
From the point of view of physical-layer features, Bluetooth
LE is specically designed for Body/Personal Area Networks,
by privileging short range and high data rate. Its lower power
consumption, if compared with regular Bluetooth, is mainly
the consequence of enhanced duty cycling support, designed
for small data bursts; however, in the case of continuous data
streams, its power consumption is similar to regular Bluetooth.
In addition, despite its name, Bluetooth LE is not backward-
compatible with Bluetooth: thus, the wide existing deployment
of Bluetooth interfaces cannot be a competitive advantage for
Bluetooth LE; however, the Bluetooth/Bluetooth LE designs
share several hardware components, allowing new chipsets to
run both regular and LE modes (though not at the same time).
A downside of Bluetooth LE is that its network specication
only supports the star topology, making it unsuitable for some
kinds of environmental monitoring applications.
DASH7 proposes itself as the IoT enabling technology,
with very long coverage range, possibility to penetrate con-
crete walls, and relatively low data rate. Its supporters claim
that its design allows a single device to run on battery for
almost a decade. An important advantage of DASH7 over its
competitors is the simple design of its physical and network
layers, which make the DASH7-compliant chipsets cheap and
easy to manufacture. To enable multi-year battery life, DASH7
proposes a bursty data transfer approach over small packets;
however, this makes DASH7 unt for data streaming. In
addition, its architecture is upload-centric, i.e., optimized for
data sending and with no mesh routing support.
ZigBee represents a compromise between those two tech-
nologies, reasonable for several application domains, with
medium range and medium data rate. It is the de-facto standard
in WSN academic research: it has been extensively analyzed
in the literature and it is well known how to tune its parameters
to adapt it to different deployment environments, ranging from
personal area networks, to buildings, and environmental mon-
itoring. ZigBee offers symmetric upstream and downstream
bandwidths, making it a good choice for Machine-to-Machine
communication and for any scenario that requires both data
uploading and collection.
Finally, going to the networking-layer point of view, RPL
is the most advanced specication proposal nowadays. RPL
is an IPv6-based multi-hop routing protocol that, in principle,
could be applied to any of the other physical-layer protocols;
in practice, now it is mostly considered as the routing layer for
ZigBee (as part of the ZigBee IP effort). RPL adopts several
techniques to tune routing for data collection optimization,
but also supports point-to-point communication; it has the
advantage of being able to integrate seamlessly WSNs to the
Internet. Among its weaknesses, RPL requires a full-edged
IPv6 stack, not always supported on very constrained devices
with limited memory (less than 10 KB).
This short survey of standards concurring for the WSN
market shows that there are several carefully engineered and
well tested protocols for low power wireless links applicable
to WSNs. Relevant scenarios, such as Machine-to-Machine
communication and our own proposal, highlight how mesh
routing is a key technology for IoT and deep integration of
heterogeneous networks. From this point of view, RPL and
ZigBee are the most promising proposals: a stabilization of the
respective standards and a wide support by industries would
give a tremendous boost to widespread adoption of WSNs for
IoT applications in smart cities.
III. REFERENCE MODEL
Widespread deployments of WSN in smart cities and their
interoperability with mobile devices enable several interesting
interactions. Our main motivation is to support a cost-effective
realization of wide-scale urban monitoring applications. The
typical case of structural monitoring applications presented
as reference scenario is characterized by requirements and
features that are common to any monitoring application where
alarm situations present differentiated urgency levels; our
proposal suits those environments.
Since communication between MANETs and WSNs could
drain precious energy resources from WSN nodes, a crucial
point is to design solutions and protocols that minimize
MANET-WSN interactions, by enabling them only for urgent
data delivery. While we have already addressed some of the
problems of the WSN-MANET integration from the WSN
perspective in our previous work (please refer to [13] for
further information on energy-saving techniques applied at
the WSN side), this article focuses on the MANET side.
Hence, in the rest of this paper we detail all main coordination
and clustering functions realized at MANET nodes for WSN-
MANET integration in IoT deployment environments.
We complete this section by sketching our abstract reference
model and by providing some needed background material.
Our distributed architecture includes two main network layers:
at the lower level, WSN sensor nodes form an autonomous
routing layer that delivers normal/urgent data to one or more
roots; at the higher level, multi-homed mobile MANET nodes
roam across the WSN-equipped environment. We assume a
tree-based data collection for WSNs: tree-like topologies for
WSN data routing have been widely employed in both exper-
imental protocols, such as CTP [14], and in more recent stan-
dardization efforts, such as ZigBee and IETF RPL [11], [12].
Thus, we decided to use a generic tree-based protocol in our
work to easily enable its deployment and immediate usage
with all emerging collection solutions and standard speci-
cations, possibly biased toward technologies that differently
from IEEE 802.15.4, do not suffer from interferences with co-
existing IEEE 802.11 networks used by MANET nodes. Our
tree formation and data routing work as follows. Generally,
data roots start advertising a zero cost, while each internal
node advertises a total incremental cost, equal to the cost of
its father node plus the cost of the link to the next hop; data
packets ow along paths toward lower cost nodes. The WSN
level opportunistically exploits its MANET nodes in visibility
to create the additional low-latency high-bandwidth overlay
for urgent data routing. To glue together WSNs and MANETs,
MANET nodes exploit their WSN interfaces to participate to
urgent data routing by dynamically discovering WSN nodes
during their roaming and by advertising their presence to them.
To overcome mobility and scalability issues typical of large
and dense MANET deployments, we claim the need for novel
BELLAVISTA et al.: CONVERGENCE OF MANET AND WSN IN IoT URBAN SCENARIOS 3561
solutions and standards to organize MANET nodes in small
local clusters, as we will better detail in the following. For
the sake of easy readability and presentation clarity, let us
dene here some useful terms. Roots are sensor nodes that
advertise themselves as collection tree roots, typically acting
as gateways to the Internet. All other sensor nodes build
routing trees to forward collected data toward roots at the
WSN layer. A WSN exit point is any WSN node in visibility
of at least one MANET node and able to jump urgent data
over the MANET, while a WSN entry point is the WSN
node with the lowest gradient cost that the MANET cluster
can reach. Finally, MANET entry/exit points are MANET
nodes that can respectively receive/forward data from/to the
WSN. Our solution is general enough to work with most tree-
based sensor data collection standards and related research-
oriented protocols, such as IETF RPL and CTP. IETF RPL
is a very promising standard specication in the eld, but
at the current stage there are still a very few examples of
its deployment and it suffers from limited testing in realistic
in-the-eld scenarios. Therefore, in our current prototype of
the proposal, we have decided to be fully compliant with
CTP because of its thoroughly assessed robustness and its
strong developers community working on it. In this scenario
the value of the gradient of a sensor node is dened as the
sum of the expected transmission hops to route a packet from
that node to the root [15]. Additional information about CTP
is out of the scope of this paper and the interested reader
can refer to [14].
IV. MANET AND WSN CONVERGENCE:
A PROTOCOL PROPOSAL
This section presents our original protocols to enable
MANET and WSN convergence, and then describes the
most important cluster formation protocol by detailing packet
exchanges performed at the MANET layer.
A. Design Guidelines and Protocol Overview
Our original proposal for MANET overlay includes two
core functions: i) MANET-WSN integration to enable cross-
network impromptu communications, operated only if that is
feasible and benecial and ii) MANET cluster formation to
organize MANET nodes in small clusters to avoid the routing
issues of large MANETs.
About MANET-WSN integration, two facilities can enable
a MANET to play the role of WSN backbone: discovery, to let
MANET nodes explore the WSN topology and select the WSN
node with the best gradient, i.e., WSN entry point, and adver-
tising, to inform the WSN of the presence of MANET entry
points. Since in many modern low-power radio transceivers
sending and receiving packets require comparable amounts
of energy, there is the need to minimize both discovery and
advertising packets. In fact, regardless of WSN trafc, keeping
our MANET-WSN integration support always active would
impose an additional trafc load on the WSN thus worsening
node power consumption. Hence, our solution avoids packet
exchanges between MANET and WSN nodes in normal situ-
ations, by keeping MANET nodes usually idle. MANET only
passively snoop CTP trafc to obtain information about the
underlying WSN tree topology and, only upon snifng a urgent
packet, MANET nodes start coordinating and communicating
with WSN ones to self-organize as relays for urgent WSN
packets [13].
About MANET cluster formation, we recall that MANET
relays should avoid all fragilities related to network architec-
tures with centralized coordination and multiple-hops com-
munication. Thus, upon snooping an urgent WSN packet,
MANET nodes should organize themselves in local inde-
pendent clusters, each one with its own MANET entry and
exit points. Note that, due to diversity in wireless coverage
ranges between IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 [16], [17],
even small clusters can signicantly improve data collection
performance, by making it possible to jump several WSN hops
by traversing fewer MANET ones, as exemplied in [18]. In
addition, small clusters are intrinsically more tolerant with
regard to node mobility if compared with fully-connected
mobile networks because they have to keep a limited number
of routing paths.
B. MANET Cluster Formation
Our MANET-WSN integration exploits MANET clusters
formed opportunistically in localized areas that need urgent
data transmission. It is simple, robust, and relies only on one-
hop communications and limited-hop broadcasts. Although
our protocol does not intrinsically pose a limit to the hop
radius of clusters, results in the literature indicate that for
IEEE 802.11 technology, there exists an ad-hoc horizon, at
23 hops and 1020 nodes, where the benets of MANET
virtually vanishes [19]. In our system, we found that a 2-hop
limit is a good tradeoff between routing improvements and
cluster robustness, as conrmed by our experimental results
(see Fig. 6).
The cluster formation protocol is reactively started by any
MANET node, called clusterhead, that snoops a urgent data
packet being routed on the WSN. As in Fig. 1, the protocol
consists of three phases. In the rst phase, the clusterhead
extracts from the sniffed packet the gradient of the WSN
node that has routed it (42 in the example in Fig. 1) and it
broadcasts a 2-hop limited request to other nodes, by asking
them to join the new cluster, i.e., join request. In the second
phase, MANET nodes that received the join request send a
discovery message to the WSN layer to get the best gradient
among the WSN nodes they can communicate with; then, they
compare it with the gradient declared in the join request:
only the MANET nodes that can communicate with WSN
nodes with a better gradient will take part to the cluster. In
the third and last phase, MANET nodes communicate to the
clusterhead that they joined the new cluster. The clusterhead
gathers responses from cluster nodes and chooses as MANET
exit point the node with the best gradient. Collecting answers
from all the nodes participating the cluster, allows the clus-
terhead to estimate the number of messages that MANET and
WSN will exchange: appropriate policies can decide how long
the integration should last, giving guarantees on its energy
requirements [13].
3562 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 13, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2013
Fig. 1. Phases of MANET cluster formation. An exclamation mark identies the clusterhead. Each MANET node is marked with the best gradient (the
lowest) it can reach at the WSN layer. Phase 1: a MANET node snoops an urgent data packet and broadcasts a hop-limited broadcast request (step 1 in
gure). Phase 2: MANET nodes hit by the request send discovery request to WSN, obtain gradient costs of reachable sensor nodes, and choose the best one
(step 2). Phase 3: all sensor nodes reply to the MANET node that started the process (step 3). MANET nodes marked with g will not enter the cluster
because their gradient is worse than what broadcasted in phase 1.
Fig. 2. State diagram of the MANET coordination protocol. For the sake of presentation clarity, it does not show the sub-states necessary to manage
asynchronous communication with WSN nodes.
Fig. 1 shows that the proposed protocol forms clusters in a
tree-like pattern, with the notable property of a better gradient
by following any path from the clusterhead to MANET leaves.
This property strongly enhances the robustness of urgent data
routing within a cluster: in fact, when the clusterhead tries
to route an urgent packet to the designated exit node, it is
guaranteed that at each hop the urgent packet will be forwarded
to a MANET node with a better gradient than previous hop.
Moreover, since all the MANET nodes participating to the
cluster are in visibility of a WSN node, even if the path to the
nal MANET exit point is disrupted (due to node mobility),
intermediate nodes can still route the urgent data packet back
to the WSN, by achieving anyway a (suboptimal) performance
boost.
C. MANET Coordination Protocol
To better understand the different roles that MANET nodes
can play in a cluster, we model it as a nite state machine
shown in Fig. 2. MANET nodes start working in the IDLE
BELLAVISTA et al.: CONVERGENCE OF MANET AND WSN IN IoT URBAN SCENARIOS 3563
state: in this state, they only snoop WSN trafc, while waiting
for urgent packets to be routed by the underlying WSN. When
a MANET node snoops an urgent packet, it switches to a
new state where it broadcasts a hop-limited join request to
other MANET nodes, to ask for joining the new cluster where
the sender acts as clusterhead. Then, the potential clusterhead
waits for a xed amount of time to receive replies from nearby
MANET nodes: if at least one MANET node joined the cluster,
it becomes a clusterhead; if no nodes joined, instead, it goes
back to IDLE.
Upon receiving a join request, based on the TTL (time to
live as number of hops) in the join request, IDLE nodes decide
if either they have to broadcast it again (for TTL > 1) or not
(for TTL = 1). Then, they broadcast a discovery request to
the WSN to obtain the gradient value of the WSN nodes they
can communicate with; if the WSN gradient value obtained is
better than the one broadcasted by the potential clusterhead,
they send back to their parent the decision to join.
After cluster formation, the clusterhead periodically broad-
casts hop-limited keep-alive packets, forwarded by intermedi-
ate nodes to other intermediate nodes and leaves, to extend the
cluster lifetime: cluster lifetime is xed by taking into account
both the number of MANET nodes and the frequency of
discovery/advertising functions [13]; when keep-alive packets
are not renewed, the cluster naturally disappears and nodes
return to the IDLE state.
Finally, as explained in the previous sections, clusters are
formed independently of one another. Thus, a single MANET
node can participate to different clusters, even if it can be
clusterhead in one cluster only.
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
We thoroughly validated our proposal through both a wide-
scale simulation study and a real deployment; here, due to
space limitations, we will briey introduce our real testbed,
and then we will totally focus on simulation results. Sensor
nodes are TelosB nodes running TinyOS 2.1.1 and hosting the
CTP implementation [14], [20], [21]. To assess the effect of
mobility on opportunistic cross-network integration and data
routing, we deployed several sensor nodes at the sides of a
90 m long corridor at our campus and we put another sensor
aboard of a small robot capable of moving at different speeds,
as shown in Fig. 3. With that prototype, we could tune the
proposed MANET-WSN convergence facilities and protocols,
and we collected various results that conrm the feasibility of
the proposed approach; for more results and insights about our
real testbed and about the simulation results described in the
following, we refer interested readers also to our project Web
site
1
.
To validate our proposal on a wide scale, we developed and
run extensive simulations: we have originally ported CTP to
the QualNet network simulator
2
and we have implemented our
protocol on top of it. In the adopted simulation environment,
1
Additional information, experimental results, and prototype/simulation
code are available at: http://www.lia.deis.unibo.it/Research/WHOO/
2
Scalable Network Technologies, QualNet Simulator http://www.scalable-
networks.com/products/qualnet/
Fig. 3. Robot carrying a TelosB node.
we made the sensor nodes use the IEEE 802.15.4 physical
layer and a Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) MAC
protocol, thus simulating a realistic communication testbed,
similar to widely adopted real-world sensor nodes, such as
TelosB and MICAz
3
. In addition, we modied the used MAC
layer to simulate the delays due to radio duty cycling, as
often done in WSNs to improve battery lifetime [22], [23].
In particular, we simulated the delays experienced by a TelosB
sensor node running on a 2.5% duty cycle that keeps the radio
interface active for the 2.5% of its running time. This duty
cycling is very less aggressive than what usually employed
(1% or less [24]). Finally, MANET nodes use the IEEE
802.11b physical and MAC layers [16].
To evaluate the performance of our system in a smart city
IoT environment, we have modeled two scenarios in QualNet.
The rst one is a 1 km-long and 10 m-wide street, monitored
by 50 sensor nodes, 20 m apart from each other; the sensor
node at the beginning of the street acts as the tree root, while
the one at the end of the street alternately generates one normal
data packet and one urgent data packet, with a period of
3 s. The second one is a 1 km-long and 1km-wide square,
monitored by 200 nodes positioned in a star-like shape with
eight branches, each one composed by 25 sensor nodes 20 m
apart from each other; the sensor node at the center of the star
is at the center of the square and acts as the tree root, while
the ones at the end of the branches alternately generate one
normal data packet and one urgent data packet, with a period
of 3 s. Finally, let us note that in this paper we primarily
focus on measuring network performances because energy is a
less pressing issue at the MANET side compared to the WSN
one, but we invite readers interested in energy consumption
and WSN-side measurements to refer to our previous work
published in [13].
We rst evaluated packet latencies. In particular, we have
observed the impact of MANET node density on packet
delivery latency. We have simulated the reference scenarios by
constantly increasing the number of randomly placed MANET
3
By default, TinyOS uses a CSMA MAC instead of the IEEE 802.15.4
MAC on TelosB; MICAz and other sensor nodes that use the same radio
transceiver.
3564 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 13, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2013
Fig. 4. Packet latency vs. MANET nodes density in (a) street and (b) square scenarios.
Fig. 5. Ratio of packets successfully routed vs. MANET nodes speed in (a) street and (b) square scenarios.
nodes and we have repeated 30 runs for each test; the collected
condence interval were always under 5% of the estimated
average. Fig. 4(a) shows obtained results for the street sce-
nario. As expected, our solution vastly reduces delivery latency
of urgent packets in every tested case. More interestingly,
results identify the minimum MANET node density that grants
the best latency improvements, in our scenario 30 MANET
nodes in a 1-km long street: that corresponds to a realistic city
environment density. With lower MANET densities, latencies
are not so improved because MANET clusters do not cover
all the WSN areas, thus forcing data packets to hop over
slower WSN hops. With more than 30 nodes, latency slightly
increases due to the additional trafc induced by advertising
and discovery packets, which cause more packet collisions.
Experimental results for the square scenario [Fig. 4(b)] show
that it is necessary a higher number of MANET nodes to
have a relevant decrease of latencies for urgent packets: that
behavior is expected because MANET nodes are scattered in
a much larger area and can also be placed in areas that are
disconnected from the WSN. However, 100 MANET nodes per
km
2
is a challenging and very low density in an open space
(not so typical in a city area), and achieved results conrm that
the performances of our approach are good even with such a
low MANET density.
Our second set of experimental results assesses the impact
of MANET node mobility on the packet delivery ratio, namely
the number of packets successfully dispatched from data
source to root. We used the same scenarios of the previous
evaluation (40 MANET nodes for the street scenario and 100
for the square one) and we made MANET nodes move ran-
domly over the simulated areas adopting the random waypoint
mobility model at various speeds (from 0 m/s to 10 m/s).
As expected, the CTP protocol is very reliable and always
delivers more than 98% of packets, as shown in Fig. 5. Our
solution achieves a packet delivery ratio comparable to CTP
when MANET nodes are not moving, while the ratio sensibly
decreases as MANET nodes become more and more mobile.
In the street scenario, it delivers more than 80% of urgent
packets when MANET nodes move at 1 m/s, and drops to
about 50% when MANET nodes move at 10 m/s; whereas in
the square scenario it delivers slightly less than 80% packets at
1 m/s (the average speed of pedestrians is about 1.4 m/s) and
BELLAVISTA et al.: CONVERGENCE OF MANET AND WSN IN IoT URBAN SCENARIOS 3565
Fig. 6. Ratio of urgent packets successfully routed by 3-hops MANETs in
street and square scenarios.
30% at 10 m/s. Under the same conditions, we also collected
results about packet latencies (not shown here for the sake of
space limitations) that demonstrate that latency of successfully
delivered packets is substantially constant for different node
speeds. Let us note that results of Fig. 5 are expected because
the fast movements of MANET nodes in the square scenario
can break MANET clusters apart more easily compared to the
street scenario.
However, the delivery ratio of our solution can be boosted
by repeatedly sending of urgent packets. For example, when
MANET nodes move at 1 m/s, an urgent packet has about
80% probability to be successfully routed to the collection
tree root. If the node sends the packet twice, the probability
of successful routing raises to 96%; another repeated send
operation achieves the success probability of 99%.
Moreover, to conrm our 2-hop limit protocol design
choice, in Fig. 6 we show the delivery ratio of urgent packets
in the same scenarios considered before, but with 3-hops
MANET clusters (3 hops between the clusterhead and the
exit point). Results clearly show that performances decrease
sharply compared to the 2-hops MANET clusters test because
it is more likely that a MANET routing path will break down
due to node mobility, especially in the square scenario where
mobile nodes can roam more freely compared to a narrow
street. Thus, we claim that our 2-hops based solution achieves
the best tradeoff between routing speed and delivery ratio,
by allowing to signicantly improve data collection in most
common use cases for typical smart city environments.
VI. RELATED WORK
IoT research eld works over the growing maturity of
several related technologies, such as MANET, WSN, RFID
devices, and so forth. The growing interest in this area is
also demonstrated by several recent special issues on IoT
[1], [25]. Despite the encouraging results obtained so far, most
research works tend to mainly focus on specic technological
issues (e.g., RFID tag reading speed, security, etc.), and only
recently, a few research efforts have started to tackle IoT
management issues rising from the full integration of different
technologies. In the following, for the sake of briefness, we
sketch a limited selection of solutions close to our envisioned
approach recognize MANET and WSNs convergence as a key
enabling technology for IoT smart cities scenarios.
Regarding urban IoT scenarios, several successful industrial
and academic research initiatives are available addressing
different application domains. There are already various appli-
cations to inform car drivers willing to park at a parking area
4
and similar projects to monitor free parking lots
5,6
; these
projects are important and demonstrate the growing interest
in this IoT domain. From an architectural perspective, and
addressing a different application domain, Zorzi et al. call for a
radical change from todays Intranet of things to the future
Internet of things by indicating as core priorities the denition
of an architectural reference model for the interoperability of
IoT systems and of mechanisms for an efcient integration
of IoT architectures into the service layer of next generation
future Internet networking infrastructures [26].
In a more technical perspective, the use of multi-radio
devices in WSNs and the integration of WSNs and mobile
nodes have recently started to appear in the IoT literature.
Yarvis et al. demonstrated that a modest number of reliable
long-range links can improve WSN delivery ratio and battery
lifetime [27]. A practical proof of this effect is the ExScal
project, which deployed more than a thousand WSN nodes, by
exploiting about two hundreds high-powered dual-radio nodes
as an always-on high-speed network backbone [28]. Siphon
is similar to ExScal but exploits multi-radio sensor nodes to
provide an on-demand trafc management service that relieves
congested trafc [29]. In general, these works assume that a
relevant subset of sensor nodes provides both a low-power
radio and an IEEE 802.11 interface; however, this assumption
is not realistic for deployment environments that should be
cheap and cannot guarantee enough power for IEEE 802.11
interfaces for all the expected lifetime.
The exploitation of mobile nodes as data harvesters and as
WSN gateways towards the Internet is a hot IoT research area.
Chakrabarti et al. employ mobile nodes with a predictable
roaming path as data sinks/mules, thus trading lower power
consumption for higher latencies [30]. Wang et al. showed
that one mobile relay that stores/forwards gathered data to
a data sink can improve WSN lifetime up to a factor of
four [31]. Ma et al. propose the mWSN tiered architecture,
which makes WSN nodes form a cluster around the expected
position of mobile nodes that act as statically predened and
mobile gateways toward the Internet [32]. For an exhaustive
survey of hierarchical WSN architectures enhanced by mobile
nodes, interested readers may refer to [33].
While all these papers highlight relevant issues related to
energy saving, WSN and MANET convergence aspects are
still widely unexplored. In fact, to the best of our knowledge,
our solution is the rst one in the IoT eld specically focusing
4
World Sensing Smart Cities, automated detection of car in parking spots:
http://www.worldsensing.com/smart-cities
5
University of Guelph, smart parking lot project: http://www.uoguelph.ca/
~qmahmoud/fyp/nidal-nasser-3.pdf
6
Meshnetics, ZigBee parking automation: http://www.meshnetics.com/
ZigBee_Parking_Automation_Case_Study.pdf
3566 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 13, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2013
on mobility by proposing to opportunistically exploit mobile
MANET nodes as mobile relays for fast collection of WSN
urgent data in smart city environments.
VII. CONCLUSION
IoT-based services and applications are already becoming
an integral part of our everyday life. Basic technologies that
leverage seamless interaction between WSN-equipped things
and impromptu MANET opportunistically formed by humans
moving in the smart city will play a relevant role in different
application domains, such as logistics and trafc management.
We believe that our proposal represents a step forward toward
the development of novel real-world deployment solutions able
to exploit the full potential of MANET and WSN conver-
gence in the IoT in order to support fast collection of urban
data.
Our proposal shows the enhancements of IoT for smart
cities: ubiquitous and collaborative urban sensing integrated
with smart objects can vastly improve citizen life by pro-
viding an intelligent environment that offers services, pre-
vents emergencies and reacts to them, and enables a ne-
grained adaptive control for better and more scalable man-
agement of urban environments. We have also provided a
full assessment and quantitative evaluation of the feasibility
and performance of the proposed solution, by reporting an
extensive set of simulation results to assess its benets and
costs.
The obtained results encourage us toward extending and
rening our prototype. On the one hand, we are investigating
the possibility of exploiting our solution in other different IoT
application areas, such as in Intelligent Transportation Systems
(ITSs) to integrate vehicular networks and on-the-road WSNs
trafc sensors, and to support completely decentralized ambi-
ent monitoring in indoor smart spaces. On the other hand, we
are considering more expressive management operations: in
particular, we are interested in dynamic, ne, and application-
aware differentiated tuning of transmission power levels used
at the WSN side.
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Paolo Bellavista (SM98) received the Degree
and Ph.D. degrees in computer science engineering
from the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in
2001. He is currently an Associate Professor with
the University of Bologna. His current research
interests include from mobile agent-based middle-
ware solutions and pervasive wireless computing to
location/context-aware services and adaptive multi-
media. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the
IEEE Communications, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS
ON COMPUTER, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
NETWORK AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
SERVICES COMPUTING, Elsevier Pervasive Mobile Computing, and Springer
Journal of Network and Systems Management. He is a senior member of
ACM.
Giuseppe Cardone (M10) is a Research Fellow
with the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy. He
received the Ph.D. degree in computer science engi-
neering from the University of Bologna in 2013. His
current research interests include heterogeneous net-
works integration, high performance distributed sys-
tems, resource-aware routing, and pervasive mobile
sensing. He is a member of ACM.
Antonio Corradi (M77) received the Degree
in electrical engineering from the University of
Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 1979, and the M.S.
degree in electrical engineering from Cornell Uni-
versity, Ithaca, NY, USA, in 1980. He is a Full Pro-
fessor of computer engineering with the University
of Bologna. His current research interests include
distributed and parallel systems and solutions, mid-
dleware for pervasive and heterogeneous computing,
infrastructure support for context-aware multimodal
services, network management, and mobile agent
platforms. He is a member of ACM and Italian Association for Computing.
Luca Foschini (M04) received the Degree and
Ph.D. degrees in computer science engineering from
the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 2007.
He is currently an Assistant Professor of computer
engineering with the University of Bologna. His
current research interests include distributed sys-
tems and solutions for pervasive wireless comput-
ing environments, system and service management,
context-aware services and adaptive multimedia, and
management of cloud computing systems. He is a
member of ACM.