Using Delay Tolerant Networks as a Backbone for Low-cost Smart Cities

Rapid urbanization burdens city infrastructure and creates the need for local governments to maximize the usage of resources to serve its citizens. Smart city projects aim to alleviate the urbanization problem by deploying a vast amount of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices to monitor and manage environmental conditions and infrastructure. However, smart city projects can be extremely expensive to deploy and manage. A significant portion of the expense is a result of providing Internet connectivity via 5G or WiFi to IoT devices. This paper proposes the use of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) as a backbone for smart city communication; enabling developing communities to become smart cities at a fraction of the cost. A model is introduced to aid policy makers in designing and evaluating the expected performance of such networks. Preliminary results are presented based on a public transit network data-set from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Finally, innovative ways of improving network performance in a low-cost smart city is discussed.Comment: 3 pages, accepted to IEEE SmartComp 201

Improving Connectivity for Remote Cancer Patient Symptom Monitoring and Reporting in Rural Medically Underserved Regions

Rural residents are often faced with many disparities when compared to their urban counterparts. Two key areas where these disparities are apparent are access to health and Internet services. Improved access to healthcare services has the potential to increase residents\u27 quality of life and life expectancy. Additionally, improved access to Internet services can create significant social returns in increasing job and educational opportunities, and improving access to healthcare. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on the intersection between access to Internet and healthcare services in rural areas. More specifically, it attempts to analyze systems that can be used to improve Internet access in rural areas for the sake of remote patient monitoring. The lingering rural connectivity problem is such that rural residents are often faced with the problem of expensive yet unreliable Internet connectivity. This coupled with the sparse population/business density, poses a detriment to the general development of such communities. As urbanization poaches more rural residents and further reduces the population density, rural residents are left behind from the developmental benefits of the Internet. In mitigating this disparity, some rural areas have adopted alternate Internet models to improve access to Internet services within their communities. Such alternate models include communal access points, delay tolerant networks, and resource sharing networks. Such Internet sharing models may be useful for facilitating remote patient monitoring. However, it will take a careful analysis of the social behaviors of rural residents and the inherent characteristics of the network sharing models to properly harness both for rural remote patient monitoring. Consequently, this work evaluates Internet sharing architectures that leverage minimal Internet infrastructure along with stochastic node mobility for the dispersal of non-emergent personal health information for remote patient monitoring within a rural community; investigates methods of routing opportunistically in quasi-deterministic delay tolerant networks and its effects on the delivery of time-sensitive data in challenged rural environments; and designs and evaluates a mobile API that facilitates the opportunistic transmission of patient-reported outcomes via the Internet sharing model without violating privacy constraints