Containment Control in Mobile Networks

(c) 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TAC.2008.930098In this paper, the problem of driving a collection of mobile robots to a given target destination is studied. In particular, we are interested in achieving this transfer in an orderly manner so as to ensure that the agents remain in the convex polytope spanned by the leader-agents, while the remaining agents, only employ local interaction rules. To this aim we exploit the theory of partial difference equations and propose hybrid control schemes based on stop-go rules for the leader-agents. Non-Zenoness, liveness and convergence of the resulting system are also analyzed

Partial containment control over signed graphs

In this paper, we deal with the containment control problem in presence of antagonistic interactions. In particular, we focus on the cases in which it is not possible to contain the entire network due to a constrained number of control signals. In this scenario, we study the problem of selecting the nodes where control signals have to be injected to maximize the number of contained nodes. Leveraging graph condensations, we find a suboptimal and computationally efficient solution to this problem, which can be implemented by solving an integer linear problem. The effectiveness of the selection strategy is illustrated through representative simulations.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for presentation at the 2019 European Control Conference (ECC19), Naples, Ital

Applications of Temporal Graph Metrics to Real-World Networks

Real world networks exhibit rich temporal information: friends are added and removed over time in online social networks; the seasons dictate the predator-prey relationship in food webs; and the propagation of a virus depends on the network of human contacts throughout the day. Recent studies have demonstrated that static network analysis is perhaps unsuitable in the study of real world network since static paths ignore time order, which, in turn, results in static shortest paths overestimating available links and underestimating their true corresponding lengths. Temporal extensions to centrality and efficiency metrics based on temporal shortest paths have also been proposed. Firstly, we analyse the roles of key individuals of a corporate network ranked according to temporal centrality within the context of a bankruptcy scandal; secondly, we present how such temporal metrics can be used to study the robustness of temporal networks in presence of random errors and intelligent attacks; thirdly, we study containment schemes for mobile phone malware which can spread via short range radio, similar to biological viruses; finally, we study how the temporal network structure of human interactions can be exploited to effectively immunise human populations. Through these applications we demonstrate that temporal metrics provide a more accurate and effective analysis of real-world networks compared to their static counterparts.Comment: 25 page

Localization to Enhance Security and Services in Wi-Fi Networks under Privacy Constraints

Developments of seamless mobile services are faced with two broad challenges, systems security and user privacy - access to wireless systems is highly insecure due to the lack of physical boundaries and, secondly, location based services (LBS) could be used to extract highly sensitive user information. In this paper, we describe our work on developing systems which exploit location information to enhance security and services under privacy constraints. We describe two complimentary methods which we have developed to track node location information within production University Campus Networks comprising of large numbers of users. The location data is used to enhance security and services. Specifically, we describe a method for creating geographic firewalls which allows us to restrict and enhance services to individual users within a specific containment area regardless of physical association. We also report our work on LBS development to provide visualization of spatio-temporal node distribution under privacy considerations