Content dissemination in participatory delay tolerant networks

As experience with the Web 2.0 has demonstrated, users have evolved from being only consumers of digital content to producers. Powerful handheld devices have further pushed this trend, enabling users to consume rich media (for example, through high resolution displays), as well as create it on the go by means of peripherals such as built-in cameras. As a result, there is an enormous amount of user-generated content, most of which is relevant only within local communities. For example, students advertising events taking place around campus. For such scenarios, where producers and consumers of content belong to the same local community, networks spontaneously formed on top of colocated user devices can offer a valid platform for sharing and disseminating content. Recently, there has been much research in the field of content dissemination in mobile networks, most of which exploits user mobility prediction in order to deliver messages from the producer to the consumer, via spontaneously formed Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Common to most protocols is the assumption that users are willing to participate in the content distribution network; however, because of the energy restrictions of handheld devices, users’ participation cannot be taken for granted. In this thesis, we design content dissemination protocols that leverage information about user mobility, as well as interest, in order to deliver content, while avoiding overwhelming noninterested users. We explicitly reason about battery consumption of mobile devices to model participation, and achieve fairness in terms of workload distribution. We introduce a dynamic priority scheduling framework, which enables the network to allocate the scarce energy resources available to support the delivery of the most desired messages. We evaluate this work extensively by means of simulation on a variety of real mobility traces and social networks, and draw a comparative evaluation with the major related works in the field

Interaction design for rural agricultural sensor networks

We describe the ongoing design of a sensor network for small family farms in rural Kenya. The sensor network is just one part of an ‘ecology of resources’ in which handheld devices are used to bridge the sensor network and a computer-based access point. We describe the two villages where the system is deployed and the user requirements collected. We then describe the architecture of the sensor network and detail how it fits in with the larger integrated system. We then detail our approach to interface and interaction design, and conclude by describing the next steps in the project

From MANET to people-centric networking: Milestones and open research challenges

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multi-hop ad hoc networking with the aim to present the current status of the research activities and identify the consolidated research areas, with limited research opportunities, and the hot and emerging research areas for which further research is required. We start by briefly discussing the MANET paradigm, and why the research on MANET protocols is now a cold research topic. Then we analyze the active research areas. Specifically, after discussing the wireless-network technologies, we analyze four successful ad hoc networking paradigms, mesh networks, opportunistic networks, vehicular networks, and sensor networks that emerged from the MANET world. We also present an emerging research direction in the multi-hop ad hoc networking field: people centric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications

Socio-economic aware data forwarding in mobile sensing networks and systems

The vision for smart sustainable cities is one whereby urban sensing is core to optimising city operation which in turn improves citizen contentment. Wireless Sensor Networks are envisioned to become pervasive form of data collection and analysis for smart cities but deployment of millions of inter-connected sensors in a city can be cost-prohibitive. Given the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of sensor-rich mobile devices, Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Phones (WSN-MP) provide a highly flexible and ready-made wireless infrastructure for future smart cities. In a WSN-MP, mobile phones not only generate the sensing data but also relay the data using cellular communication or short range opportunistic communication. The largest challenge here is the efficient transmission of potentially huge volumes of sensor data over sometimes meagre or faulty communications networks in a cost-effective way. This thesis investigates distributed data forwarding schemes in three types of WSN-MP: WSN with mobile sinks (WSN-MS), WSN with mobile relays (WSN-HR) and Mobile Phone Sensing Systems (MPSS). For these dynamic WSN-MP, realistic models are established and distributed algorithms are developed for efficient network performance including data routing and forwarding, sensing rate control and and pricing. This thesis also considered realistic urban sensing issues such as economic incentivisation and demonstrates how social network and mobility awareness improves data transmission. Through simulations and real testbed experiments, it is shown that proposed algorithms perform better than state-of-the-art schemes.Open Acces

Proximity as a Service via Cellular Network-Assisted Mobile Device-to-Device

PhD ThesisThe research progress of communication has brought a lot of novel technologies to meet the multi-dimensional demands such as pervasive connection, low delay and high bandwidth. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a way to no longer treat the User Equipment (UEs) as a terminal, but rather as a part of the network for service provisioning. This thesis decouples UEs into service providers (helpers) and service requesters. By collaboration among proximal devices, with the coordination of cellular networks, some local tasks can be achieved, such as coverage extension, computation o oading, mobile crowdsourcing and mobile crowdsensing. This thesis proposes a generic framework Proximity as a Service (PaaS) for increasing the coverage with demands of service continuity. As one of the use cases, the optimal helper selection algorithm of PaaS for increasing the service coverage with demands of service continuity is called ContAct based Proximity (CAP). Mainly, fruitful contact information (e.g., contact duration, frequency, and interval) is captured, and is used to handle ubiquitous proximal services through the optimal selection of helpers. The nature of PaaS is evaluated under the Helsinki city scenario, with movement model of Points Of Interest (POI) and with critical factors in uencing the service demands (e.g., success ratio, disruption duration and frequency). Simulation results show the advantage of CAP, in both success ratio and continuity of the service (outputs). Based on this perspective, metrics such as service success ratio and continuity as a service evaluation of the PaaS are evaluated using the statistical theory of the Design Of Experiments (DOE). DOE is used as there are many dimensions to the state space (access tolerance, selected helper number, helper access limit, and transmit range) that can in uence the results. A key contribution of this work is that it brings rigorous statistical experiment design methods into the research into mobile computing. Results further reveal the influence of four factors (inputs), e.g., service tolerance, number of helpers allocated, the number of concurrent devices supported by each helper and transmit range. Based on this perspective, metrics such as service success ratio and continuity are evaluated using DOE. The results show that transmit range is the most dominant factor. The number of selected helpers is the second most dominant factor. Since di erent factors have di erent regression levels, a uni ed 4 level full factorial experiment and a cubic multiple regression analysis have been carried out. All the interactions and the corresponding coe cients have been found. This work is the rst one to evaluate LTE-Direct and WiFi-Direct in an opportunistic proximity service. The contribution of the results for industry is to guide how many users need to cooperate to enable mobile computing and for academia. This reveals the facts that: 1, in some cases, the improvement of spectrum e ciency brought by D2D is not important; 2, nodal density and the resources used in D2D air-interfaces are important in the eld of mobile computing. This work built a methodology to study the D2D networks with a di erent perspective (PaaS)

Group-Based Data Offloading Techniques Assisted by D2D Communication in 5G Mobile Network

Machine type communication devices proposed as one of the substantial data collections in the 5G of wireless networks. However, the existing mobile communication network is not designed to handle massive access from the MTC devices instead of human type communication. In this context, we propose the device-to-device communication assisted a mobile terminal (smartphone) on data computing, focusing on data generated from a correlated source of machine type communication devices. We consider the scenario that the MTC devices after collecting the data will transmit to a smartphone for computing. With the limitation of computing resources at the smartphone, some data are offloaded to the nearby mobile edge-computing server. By adopting the sensing capability on MTC devices, we use a power exponential function to compute a correlation coefficient existing between the devices. Then we propose two grouping techniques K-Means and hierarchical clustering to combine only the MTC devices, which are spatially correlated. Based on this framework, we compare the energy consumption when all data processed locally at a smartphone or remotely at mobile edge computing server with optimal solution obtained by exhaustive search method. The results illustrated that; the proposed grouping technique reduce the energy consumption at a smartphone while satisfying a required completion time.&nbsp