Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Analysis of Power-aware Buffering Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

We study the power-aware buffering problem in battery-powered sensor networks, focusing on the fixed-size and fixed-interval buffering schemes. The main motivation is to address the yet poorly understood size variation-induced effect on power-aware buffering schemes. Our theoretical analysis elucidates the fundamental differences between the fixed-size and fixed-interval buffering schemes in the presence of data size variation. It shows that data size variation has detrimental effects on the power expenditure of the fixed-size buffering in general, and reveals that the size variation induced effects can be either mitigated by a positive skewness or promoted by a negative skewness in size distribution. By contrast, the fixed-interval buffering scheme has an obvious advantage of being eminently immune to the data-size variation. Hence the fixed-interval buffering scheme is a risk-averse strategy for its robustness in a variety of operational environments. In addition, based on the fixed-interval buffering scheme, we establish the power consumption relationship between child nodes and parent node in a static data collection tree, and give an in-depth analysis of the impact of child bandwidth distribution on parent's power consumption. This study is of practical significance: it sheds new light on the relationship among power consumption of buffering schemes, power parameters of radio module and memory bank, data arrival rate and data size variation, thereby providing well-informed guidance in determining an optimal buffer size (interval) to maximize the operational lifespan of sensor networks

Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Participatory sensing is a powerful paradigm which takes advantage of smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. Given that participatory sensing systems rely completely on the users' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information, it is paramount to effectively incentivize users' active and reliable participation. In this paper, we survey existing literature on incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems. In particular, we present a taxonomy of existing incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems, which are subsequently discussed in depth by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Finally, we discuss an agenda of open research challenges in incentivizing users in participatory sensing.Comment: Updated version, 4/25/201

Privacy Management and Optimal Pricing in People-Centric Sensing

With the emerging sensing technologies such as mobile crowdsensing and Internet of Things (IoT), people-centric data can be efficiently collected and used for analytics and optimization purposes. This data is typically required to develop and render people-centric services. In this paper, we address the privacy implication, optimal pricing, and bundling of people-centric services. We first define the inverse correlation between the service quality and privacy level from data analytics perspectives. We then present the profit maximization models of selling standalone, complementary, and substitute services. Specifically, the closed-form solutions of the optimal privacy level and subscription fee are derived to maximize the gross profit of service providers. For interrelated people-centric services, we show that cooperation by service bundling of complementary services is profitable compared to the separate sales but detrimental for substitutes. We also show that the market value of a service bundle is correlated with the degree of contingency between the interrelated services. Finally, we incorporate the profit sharing models from game theory for dividing the bundling profit among the cooperative service providers.Comment: 16 page

A Comprehensive Survey of Potential Game Approaches to Wireless Networks

Potential games form a class of non-cooperative games where unilateral improvement dynamics are guaranteed to converge in many practical cases. The potential game approach has been applied to a wide range of wireless network problems, particularly to a variety of channel assignment problems. In this paper, the properties of potential games are introduced, and games in wireless networks that have been proven to be potential games are comprehensively discussed.Comment: 44 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E98-B, no. 9, Sept. 201

Hedonic Coalition Formation for Distributed Task Allocation among Wireless Agents

Autonomous wireless agents such as unmanned aerial vehicles or mobile base stations present a great potential for deployment in next-generation wireless networks. While current literature has been mainly focused on the use of agents within robotics or software applications, we propose a novel usage model for self-organizing agents suited to wireless networks. In the proposed model, a number of agents are required to collect data from several arbitrarily located tasks. Each task represents a queue of packets that require collection and subsequent wireless transmission by the agents to a central receiver. The problem is modeled as a hedonic coalition formation game between the agents and the tasks that interact in order to form disjoint coalitions. Each formed coalition is modeled as a polling system consisting of a number of agents which move between the different tasks present in the coalition, collect and transmit the packets. Within each coalition, some agents can also take the role of a relay for improving the packet success rate of the transmission. The proposed algorithm allows the tasks and the agents to take distributed decisions to join or leave a coalition, based on the achieved benefit in terms of effective throughput, and the cost in terms of delay. As a result of these decisions, the agents and tasks structure themselves into independent disjoint coalitions which constitute a Nash-stable network partition. Moreover, the proposed algorithm allows the agents and tasks to adapt the topology to environmental changes such as the arrival/removal of tasks or the mobility of the tasks. Simulation results show how the proposed algorithm improves the performance, in terms of average player (agent or task) payoff, of at least 30.26% (for a network of 5 agents with up to 25 tasks) relatively to a scheme that allocates nearby tasks equally among agents.Comment: to appear, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computin

Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page