Article: A communication-efficient distributed sensor network framework for real-time tourist flow monitoring and control Journal: International Journal of Information and Communication Technology (IJICT) 2026 Vol.27 No.91 pp.91 - 108 Abstract: With the vigorous development of the global experience economy, the problem of overloading tourist traffic in popular scenic areas has become increasingly prominent, posing a huge threat to public safety. The traditional centralised cloud computing monitoring architecture, when dealing with massive sensing data, has bottlenecks such as communication congestion, high end-to-end latency, and high energy consumption at the edge nodes. This study proposes a communication-efficient distributed sensor network framework (CEDF), adopting a three-layer collaborative architecture of edge-fog-cloud, and downloading the feature extraction task to the edge nodes, while introducing an event-triggered communication protocol based on adaptive dynamic thresholds and a distributed state consensus algorithm. In a real scenic area with an area of approximately 25 square kilometres, 500 heterogeneous sensor nodes were deployed for on-site verification. The results showed that compared with the traditional continuous periodic transmission (CPT) and standard edge clustering (SEC) architectures, CEDF reduced the total network data communication overhead by over 90%, compressed the end-to-end closed-loop control delay to within 30 milliseconds, and increased the average tourist circulation efficiency by 34%. This research provides an engineering paradigm for the large-scale deployment of smart tourism systems. Inderscience Publishers - linking academia, business and industry through research

Title: A communication-efficient distributed sensor network framework for real-time tourist flow monitoring and control

Authors: Jingjing Yan

Addresses: School of Culture and Tourism, Henan Vocational College of Agriculture, Zhengzhou Henan, 451450, China

Abstract: With the vigorous development of the global experience economy, the problem of overloading tourist traffic in popular scenic areas has become increasingly prominent, posing a huge threat to public safety. The traditional centralised cloud computing monitoring architecture, when dealing with massive sensing data, has bottlenecks such as communication congestion, high end-to-end latency, and high energy consumption at the edge nodes. This study proposes a communication-efficient distributed sensor network framework (CEDF), adopting a three-layer collaborative architecture of edge-fog-cloud, and downloading the feature extraction task to the edge nodes, while introducing an event-triggered communication protocol based on adaptive dynamic thresholds and a distributed state consensus algorithm. In a real scenic area with an area of approximately 25 square kilometres, 500 heterogeneous sensor nodes were deployed for on-site verification. The results showed that compared with the traditional continuous periodic transmission (CPT) and standard edge clustering (SEC) architectures, CEDF reduced the total network data communication overhead by over 90%, compressed the end-to-end closed-loop control delay to within 30 milliseconds, and increased the average tourist circulation efficiency by 34%. This research provides an engineering paradigm for the large-scale deployment of smart tourism systems.

Keywords: distributed sensor network; event-triggered communication; real-time tourist flow monitoring; edge computing; smart tourism; congestion control; standard edge clustering; SEC; continuous periodic transmission; CPT.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2026.155782

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2026 Vol.27 No.91, pp.91 - 108

Received: 20 Apr 2026
Accepted: 19 May 2026
Published online: 13 Aug 2026 *

Title: A communication-efficient distributed sensor network framework for real-time tourist flow monitoring and control

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