Improving Message Dissemination in Opportunistic Networks

Data transmission has become a need in various fields, like in social networks with the diverse interaction applications, or in the scientific and engineering areas where for example the use of sensors to capture data is growing, or in emergency situations where there is the imperative need to have a communication system to coordinate rescue operations. Wireless networks have been able to solve these issues to a great extent, but what can we do when a fixed supporting infrastructure is not available or becomes inoperative because of saturation? Opportunistic wireless networks are an alternative to consider in these situations, since their operation does not depend on the existence of a telecommunications infrastructure but they provide connectivity through the organized cooperation of users. This research thesis focuses on these types of networks and is aimed at improving the dissemination of information in opportunistic networks analyzing the main causes that influence the performance of data transmission. Opportunistic networks do not depend on a fixed topology but depend on the number and mobility of users, the type and quantity of information generated and sent, as well as the physical characteristics of the mobile devices that users have to transmit the data. The combination of these elements impacts on the duration of the contact time between mobile users, directly affecting the information delivery probability. This thesis starts by presenting a thorough "state of the art" study where we present the most important contributions related to this area and the solutions offered for the evaluation of the opportunistic networks, such as simulation models, routing protocols, simulation tools, among others. After offering this broad background, we evaluate the consumption of the resources of the mobile devices that affect the performance of the the applications of opportunistic networks, both from the energetic and the memory point of view. Next, we analyze the performance of opportunistic networks considering either pedestrian and vehicular environments. The studied approaches include the use of additional fixed nodes and different data transmission technologies, to improve the duration of the contact between mobile devices. Finally, we propose a diffusion scheme to improve the performance of data transmission based on extending the duration of the contact time and the likelihood that users will collaborate in this process. This approach is complemented by the efficient management of the resources of the mobile devices.La transmisión de datos se ha convertido en una necesidad en diversos ámbitos, como en las redes sociales con sus diversas aplicaciones, o en las áreas científicas y de ingeniería donde, por ejemplo, el uso de sensores para capturar datos está creciendo, o en situaciones de emergencia donde impera la necesidad de tener un sistema de comunicación para coordinar las operaciones de rescate. Las redes inalámbricas actuales han sido capaces de resolver estos problemas en gran medida, pero ¿qué podemos hacer cuando una infraestructura de soporte fija no está disponible o estas se vuelven inoperantes debido a la saturación de peticiones de red? Las redes inalámbricas oportunísticas son una alternativa a considerar en estas situaciones, ya que su funcionamiento no depende de la existencia de una infraestructura de telecomunicaciones sino que la conectividad es a través de la cooperación organizada de los usuarios. Esta tesis de investigación se centra en estos tipos de redes oportunísticas y tiene como objetivo mejorar la difusión de información analizando las principales causas que influyen en el rendimiento de la transmisión de datos. Las redes oportunísticas no dependen de una topología fija, sino que dependen del número y la movilidad de los usuarios, del tipo y cantidad de información generada y enviada, así como de las características físicas de los dispositivos móviles que los usuarios tienen para transmitir los datos. La combinación de estos elementos influye en la duración del tiempo de contacto entre usuarios móviles, afectando directamente a la probabilidad de entrega de información. Esta tesis comienza presentando un exhaustivo estudio del ``estado del arte", donde presentamos las contribuciones más importantes relacionadas con esta área y las soluciones existentes para la evaluación de las redes oportunísticas, tales como modelos de simulación, protocolos de enrutamiento, herramientas de simulación, entre otros. Tras ofrecer esta amplia compilación de investigaciones, se evalúa el consumo de recursos de los dispositivos móviles que afectan al rendimiento de las aplicaciones de redes oportunísticas, desde el punto de vista energético así como de la memoria. A continuación, analizamos el rendimiento de las redes oportunísticas considerando tanto los entornos peatonales como vehiculares. Los enfoques estudiados incluyen el uso de nodos fijos adicionales y diferentes tecnologías de transmisión de datos, para mejorar la duración del contacto entre dispositivos móviles. Finalmente, proponemos un esquema de difusión para mejorar el rendimiento de la transmisión de datos basado en la extensión de la duración del tiempo de contacto, y de la probabilidad de que los usuarios colaboren en este proceso. Este enfoque se complementa con la gestión eficiente de los recursos de los dispositivos móviles.La transmissió de dades s'ha convertit en una necessitat en diversos àmbits, com ara en les xarxes socials amb les diverses aplicacions d'interacció, o en les àrees científiques i d'enginyeria, en les quals, per exemple, l'ús de sensors per a capturar dades creix en l'actualitat, o en situacions d'emergència en què impera la necessitat de tenir un sistema de comunicació per a coordinar les operacions de rescat. Les xarxes sense fil han sigut capaces de resoldre aquests problemes en gran manera, però què podem fer quan una infraestructura de suport fixa no està disponible, o bé aquestes es tornen inoperants a causa de la saturació de peticions de xarxa? Les xarxes sense fil oportunistes són una alternativa que cal considerar en aquestes situacions, ja que el funcionament d'aquestes xarxes no depèn de l'existència d'una infraestructura de telecomunicacions, sinó que la connectivitat s'hi aconsegueix a través de la cooperació organitzada dels usuaris. Aquesta tesi de recerca se centra en aquest tipus de xarxes, i té com a objectiu millorar la difusió d'informació en xarxes oportunistes tot analitzant les principals causes que influeixen en el rendiment de la transmissió de dades. Les xarxes oportunistes no depenen d'una topologia fixa, sinó del nombre i la mobilitat dels usuaris, del tipus i la quantitat d'informació generada i enviada, i de les característiques físiques dels dispositius mòbils que els usuaris tenen per a transmetre les dades. La combinació d'aquests elements influeix en la durada del temps de contacte entre usuaris mòbils, i afecta directament la probabilitat de lliurament d'informació. Aquesta tesi comença amb un estudi exhaustiu de l'estat de la qüestió, en què presentem les contribucions més importants relacionades amb aquesta àrea i les solucions oferides per a l'avaluació de les xarxes oportunistes, com ara models de simulació, protocols d'encaminament o eines de simulació, entre d'altres. Després de mostrar aquest ampli panorama, s'avalua el consum dels recursos dels dispositius mòbils que afecten l'acompliment de les aplicacions de xarxes oportunistes, tant des del punt de vista energètic com de la memòria. A continuació, analitzem l'acompliment de xarxes oportunistes considerant tant els entorns de vianants com els vehiculars. Els enfocaments estudiats inclouen l'ús de nodes fixos addicionals i diferents tecnologies de transmissió de dades per a millorar la durada del contacte entre dispositius mòbils. Finalment, proposem un esquema de difusió per a millorar el rendiment de la transmissió de dades basat en l'extensió de la durada del temps de contacte, i de la probabilitat que els usuaris col·laboren en aquest procés. Aquest enfocament es complementa amb la gestió eficient dels recursos dels dispositius mòbils.Herrera Tapia, J. (2017). Improving Message Dissemination in Opportunistic Networks [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/86129TESI

INDIGO: a generalized model and framework for performance prediction of data dissemination

According to recent studies, an enormous rise in location-based mobile services is expected in future. People are interested in getting and acting on the localized information retrieved from their vicinity like local events, shopping offers, local food, etc. These studies also suggested that local businesses intend to maximize the reach of their localized offers/advertisements by pushing them to the maxi- mum number of interested people. The scope of such localized services can be augmented by leveraging the capabilities of smartphones through the dissemination of such information to other interested people. To enable local businesses (or publishers) of localized services to take in- formed decision and assess the performance of their dissemination-based localized services in advance, we need to predict the performance of data dissemination in complex real-world scenarios. Some of the questions relevant to publishers could be the maximum time required to disseminate information, best relays to maximize information dissemination etc. This thesis addresses these questions and provides a solution called INDIGO that enables the prediction of data dissemination performance based on the availability of physical and social proximity information among people by collectively considering different real-world aspects of data dissemination process. INDIGO empowers publishers to assess the performance of their localized dissemination based services in advance both in physical as well as the online social world. It provides a solution called INDIGO–Physical for the cases where physical proximity plays the fundamental role and enables the tighter prediction of data dissemination time and prediction of best relays under real-world mobility, communication and data dissemination strategy aspects. Further, this thesis also contributes in providing the performance prediction of data dissemination in large-scale online social networks where the social proximity is prominent using INDIGO–OSN part of the INDIGO framework under different real-world dissemination aspects like heterogeneous activity of users, type of information that needs to be disseminated, friendship ties and the content of the published online activities. INDIGO is the first work that provides a set of solutions and enables publishers to predict the performance of their localized dissemination based services based on the availability of physical and social proximity information among people and different real-world aspects of data dissemination process in both physical and online social networks. INDIGO outperforms the existing works for physical proximity by providing 5 times tighter upper bound of data dissemination time under real-world data dissemination aspects. Further, for social proximity, INDIGO is able to predict the data dissemination with 90% accuracy and differently, from other works, it also provides the trade-off between high prediction accuracy and privacy by introducing the feature planes from an online social networks

La dissémination de contenus dans les réseaux véhiculaires

Les réseaux véhiculaires constituent une catégorie de réseaux sans fil mobiles à part entière et présentent l'originalité de permettre aux véhicules de communiquer les uns avec les autres mais aussi avec l'infrastructure quand elle existe. L'apparition des réseaux véhiculaires s'est accompagnée de l'apparition d'une myriade et variété d'applications potentielles allant de la sécurité à la gestion du trafic routier en passant par les applications de divertissement et de confort des usagers de la route. Ces applications ont suscité beaucoup d'intérêt de la part des chercheurs, des constructeurs des automobiles et des opérateurs des télécommunications. Les applications d'information et de divertissement, pour lesquelles une grande quantité de contenus peut exister, exigent que les contenus engendrés soient propagés au travers des véhicules et/ou de l'infrastructure jusqu'à atteindre les utilisateurs intéressés tout en respectant les durées de vie potentiellement limitées des contenus. La dissémination de contenus pour ce type d'applications reste un défi majeur en raison de plusieurs facteurs tels que la présence de beaucoup de contenus, la connectivité très intermittente mais encore les intérêts potentiellement hétérogènes des utilisateurs. C'est à cette thématique que nous sommes intéressés dans cette thèse; Tout d'abord, nous nous proposons une nouvelle métrique qui calcule l'utilité apportée aux utilisateurs. Elle permet de mesurer leur satisfaction par rapport aux contenus reçus. Nous la jugeons nécessaire pour évaluer les performances d'une approche de dissémination pour les applications de confort par opposition à des applications de sécurité routière. Dans un deuxième temps, nous nous concentrons sur le développement d'un nouveau protocole de dissémination, appelé I-PICK, et d'une solution de sélection des nœuds relais, appelé I-SEND, pour disséminer les contenus d'information et de divertissement en tenant compte des préférences des utilisateurs par rapport aux contenus reçus. Notre proposition est fondée sur l'échange de messages périodiques permettant l'estimation des durées de contacts et la connaissance des préférences des utilisateurs. Ces informations sont ensuite utilisées, dans un premier temps, pour effectuer un ordonnancement efficace des contenus lors de la dissémination puis choisir les relais permettant de maximiser l'utilité des utilisateurs par rapport aux contenus reçus dans un environnement caractérisé par des faibles durées de communication. Au travers de simulations nous confirmons l'efficacité de notre approche. Pour conforter le fonctionnement de nos mécanismes, nous avons implanté dans un environnement réel nos propositions I-PICK et I-SEND. Au travers d'un scénario simple, nous avons mis en évidence des risques liés à l'hétérogénéité des machines ou bien encore la difficulté du paramétrage des temporisations. Ces premiers résultats positifs montrent l'intérêt de notre technique et ouvre des pistes d'amélioration. Notre dernière contribution concerne des mécanismes de réduction du trafic cellulaire à l'aide des communications opportunistes entre les véhicules. Quand un contenu est disponible auprès d'un serveur de contenus accessible par le réseau cellulaire, il est nécessaire de proposer une méthode efficace de sélection des sources initiales qui seront choisies pour télécharger puis disséminer les contenus. Nous optons pour une solution qui pourrait reposer sur technologie SDN ainsi que sur des communications opportunistes et qui permet de choisir les sources en tant que nœuds pouvant produire un maximum d'utilité en propageant les contenus

Identifying and comparing opportunistic and social networks

Recent developments in computation and communication technologies are making big changes to the method in which people communicate with each other. Online social networks, wireless technologies and smart-phones are very common and enable communication to be maintained while people are mobile. These types of communication are closely related to humans because they carry the devices. In this research, we detect, analyse and compare opportunistic networks with human social networks. Currently opportunistic networking platforms have not gone beyond the research and development stage where they are challenging to design and implement. Therefore we develop an indoor mobility tracking system to track the participant movement inside buildings and to record the physical interaction between participants using Bluetooth technology. This system has two different ways of abstracting opportunistic networks from the experimental data: mobility (device-to-building) and co-located (device-to-device) interactions. The mobility detection system has been studied using a volunteer group of students in the School of Computer Science and Informatics. This group also has been studied to understand their social networking structure and characteristics by using electronic survey methodology. Different techniques have been used to investigate the individuals’ networks from the survey and mobility movements and a comparison between them. From a precision and recall technique, we find that 60-80 % of the participants’ social network is embedded in the opportunistic network but a small proportion 10-20% of the opportunistic network is embedded in the social network. This shows the presence of many weak links in the opportunistic network that means the opportunistic network connectivity requires a very small number of key-players to disseminate information throughout the network. We also examine both networks from the perspective of information dissemination. We find that device-to-device create many more weak links to disseminate information rather than server detection. Therefore, information quickly floods throughout the co-located network

Improving Content Delivery and Service Discovery in Networks

Production and consumption of multimedia content on the Internet is rising, fueled by the demand for content from services such as YouTube, Netflix and Facebook video. The Internet is shifting from host-based to content-centric networking. At the same time, users are shifting away from a homogeneous desktop computing environment to using a heterogeneous mix of devices, such as smartphones, tablets and thin clients, all of which allow users to consume data on the move using wireless and cellular data networks. The popularity of these new class of devices has, in turn, increased demand for multimedia content by mobile users. The emergence of rich Internet applications and the widespread adoption and use of High Definition (HD) video has also placed higher pressure on the service providers and the core Internet backbone, forcing service providers to respond to increased bandwidth use in such networks. In my thesis, I aim to provide clarity and insight into the usage of core networking protocols and multimedia consumption on both mobile and wireless networks, as well as the network core. I also present research prototypes for potential solutions to some of the problems caused by the increased multimedia consumption on the Internet

Enhancements in spectrum management techniques for heterogeneous 5G future networks

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorIn the last decade, cellular networks are undergoing with a radical change in their basic design foundations. The huge increase in traffic demand requires a novel design of future cellular networks. Driven by this increase, a network densification phenomena is occurring thereby, which in turns requires to devise efficient and reliable mechanisms to deal with the interference problems resulting from such densification. The architecture and mechanisms resulting from such drastic re-design of the network are commonly referred under the term ’5G network’. In this context, this work unveils that current networking solutions are no longer sufficient to (i) provide the required network spectral efficiency, and (ii) guarantee the desired level of quality of experience from the user side. In order to address this problem, in this thesis we propose a novel SDN-like framework that incorporates the needed mechanisms to improve spectral efficiency while delivering the desired quality of experience to users. In particular, our architecture includes the following two approaches: Our first approach addresses the intercell interference issues resulting from high network densification. To this end, we propose novel mechanisms to mitigate the inter-cell interference problem. We address the design of such schemes from two angles: (i) a controller-aided mechanism, which gathers all the information of the network at a centralized point and, based on this information, optimally schedules the transmission from different users, and (ii) a semi-distributed mechanism, which limits the signaling overhead involved in sending the information to a centralized point while providing close to optimal performance. One of the key novelties of our scheduling algorithms is that they are based on the Almost Blank SubFrame (ABSF) scheme; indeed, this scheme has been standardized only recently and very little work has addressed the design of algorithm to use it. Our second approach addresses spectral efficiency from a complementary angle: cellular traffic offloading for content update applications. This approach leverages high user mobility to offload the cellular downlink traffic through a device-to-device communication. In this context, we propose an adaptive algorithm to decide how to optimally transmit content to base stations in order to maximize traffic offload. By relying on control theory techniques, our approach delivers near optimally performance. A third key contribution of this thesis is the design of a solution that combines the above two approaches. In particular, our solution takes into account that traffic offload is taking place in the network and addresses the design of an optimal scheduling algorithm that leverages on the Almost Blank SubFrame (ABSF) scheme. Indeed, the combination of these kind of approaches has received little attention from the literature. The feasibility and performance of the approaches described above are thoroughly evaluated and compared against state-of-the-art solutions through an exhaustive simulation campaign. Our results show that the proposed approaches outperform conventional eICIC techniques as well as standard offloading mechanisms, respectively, and confirm their feasibility in terms of overhead and computational complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this thesis is the first attempt to design an unified framework which is able to optimally perform offloading for content-update distribution applications while boosting the network performance in terms of spectral efficiency.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Pablo Serrano Yáñez-Mingot.- Secretario: Juan José Alacaraz Espín.- Vocal: Matteo Cesan

Role played by the environment in the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) through the food chain

The role of food-producing environments in the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in EU plant-based food production, terrestrial animals (poultry, cattle and pigs) and aquaculture was assessed. Among the various sources and transmission routes identified, fertilisers of faecal origin, irrigation and surface water for plant-based food and water for aquaculture were considered of major importance. For terrestrial animal production, potential sources consist of feed, humans, water, air/dust, soil, wildlife, rodents, arthropods and equipment. Among those, evidence was found for introduction with feed and humans, for the other sources, the importance could not be assessed. Several ARB of highest priority for public health, such as carbapenem or extended-spectrum cephalosporin and/or fluoroquinolone-resistant Enterobacterales (including Salmonella enterica), fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter spp., methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and glycopeptide-resistant Enterococcus faecium and E. faecalis were identified. Among highest priority ARGs blaCTX-M, blaVIM, blaNDM, blaOXA-48-like, blaOXA-23, mcr, armA, vanA, cfr and optrA were reported. These highest priority bacteria and genes were identified in different sources, at primary and post-harvest level, particularly faeces/manure, soil and water. For all sectors, reducing the occurrence of faecal microbial contamination of fertilisers, water, feed and the production environment and minimising persistence/recycling of ARB within animal production facilities is a priority. Proper implementation of good hygiene practices, biosecurity and food safety management systems is very important. Potential AMR-specific interventions are in the early stages of development. Many data gaps relating to sources and relevance of transmission routes, diversity of ARB and ARGs, effectiveness of mitigation measures were identified. Representative epidemiological and attribution studies on AMR and its effective control in food production environments at EU level, linked to One Health and environmental initiatives, are urgently required.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

2012-2013, University of Memphis bulletin

University of Memphis bulletin containing the graduate catalog for 2012-2013.https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-pub-bulletins/1432/thumbnail.jp

2011-2012, University of Memphis bulletin

University of Memphis bulletin containing the graduate catalog for 2011-2012.https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-pub-bulletins/1431/thumbnail.jp