Mobile Sensing Systems

[EN] Rich-sensor smart phones have made possible the recent birth of the mobile sensing research area as part of ubiquitous sensing which integrates other areas such as wireless sensor networks and web sensing. There are several types of mobile sensing: individual, participatory, opportunistic, crowd, social, etc. The object of sensing can be people-centered or environment-centered. The sensing domain can be home, urban, vehicular Currently there are barriers that limit the social acceptance of mobile sensing systems. Examples of social barriers are privacy concerns, restrictive laws in some countries and the absence of economic incentives that might encourage people to participate in a sensing campaign. Several technical barriers are phone energy savings and the variety of sensors and software for their management. Some existing surveys partially tackle the topic of mobile sensing systems. Published papers theoretically or partially solve the above barriers. We complete the above surveys with new works, review the barriers of mobile sensing systems and propose some ideas for efficiently implementing sensing, fusion, learning, security, privacy and energy saving for any type of mobile sensing system, and propose several realistic research challenges. The main objective is to reduce the learning curve in mobile sensing systems where the complexity is very high.This work has been partially supported by the "Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion", through the "Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011" in the "Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacion Fundamental", project TEC2011-27516, and by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, through the PAID-05-12 multidisciplinary projects.Macias Lopez, EM.; Suarez Sarmiento, A.; Lloret, J. (2013). Mobile Sensing Systems. Sensors. 13(12):17292-17321. https://doi.org/10.3390/s131217292S1729217321131

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking

The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out

Trustworthiness in Mobile Cyber Physical Systems

Computing and communication capabilities are increasingly embedded in diverse objects and structures in the physical environment. They will link the ‘cyberworld’ of computing and communications with the physical world. These applications are called cyber physical systems (CPS). Obviously, the increased involvement of real-world entities leads to a greater demand for trustworthy systems. Hence, we use "system trustworthiness" here, which can guarantee continuous service in the presence of internal errors or external attacks. Mobile CPS (MCPS) is a prominent subcategory of CPS in which the physical component has no permanent location. Mobile Internet devices already provide ubiquitous platforms for building novel MCPS applications. The objective of this Special Issue is to contribute to research in modern/future trustworthy MCPS, including design, modeling, simulation, dependability, and so on. It is imperative to address the issues which are critical to their mobility, report significant advances in the underlying science, and discuss the challenges of development and implementation in various applications of MCPS

Mobile Oriented Future Internet (MOFI)

This Special Issue consists of seven papers that discuss how to enhance mobility management and its associated performance in the mobile-oriented future Internet (MOFI) environment. The first two papers deal with the architectural design and experimentation of mobility management schemes, in which new schemes are proposed and real-world testbed experimentations are performed. The subsequent three papers focus on the use of software-defined networks (SDN) for effective service provisioning in the MOFI environment, together with real-world practices and testbed experimentations. The remaining two papers discuss the network engineering issues in newly emerging mobile networks, such as flying ad-hoc networks (FANET) and connected vehicular networks

Performance of management solutions and cooperation approaches for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

A wide range of daily-life applications supported by vehicular networks attracted the interest, not only from the research community, but also from governments and the automotive industry. For example, they can be used to enable services that assist drivers on the roads (e.g., road safety, traffic monitoring), to spread commercial and entertainment contents (e.g., publicity), or to enable communications on remote or rural regions where it is not possible to have a common network infrastructure. Nonetheless, the unique properties of vehicular networks raise several challenges that greatly impact the deployment of these networks. Most of the challenges faced by vehicular networks arise from the highly dynamic network topology, which leads to short and sporadic contact opportunities, disruption, variable node density, and intermittent connectivity. This situation makes data dissemination an interesting research topic within the vehicular networking area, which is addressed by this study. The work described along this thesis is motivated by the need to propose new solutions to deal with data dissemination problems in vehicular networking focusing on vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs). To guarantee the success of data dissemination in vehicular networks scenarios it is important to ensure that network nodes cooperate with each other. However, it is not possible to ensure a fully cooperative scenario. This situation makes vehicular networks suitable to the presence of selfish and misbehavior nodes, which may result in a significant decrease of the overall network performance. Thus, cooperative nodes may suffer from the overwhelming load of services from other nodes, which comprises their performance. Trying to solve some of these problems, this thesis presents several proposals and studies on the impact of cooperation, monitoring, and management strategies on the network performance of the VDTN architecture. The main goal of these proposals is to enhance the network performance. In particular, cooperation and management approaches are exploited to improve and optimize the use of network resources. It is demonstrated the performance gains attainable in a VDTN through both types of approaches, not only in terms of bundle delivery probability, but also in terms of wasted resources. The results and achievements observed on this research work are intended to contribute to the advance of the state-of-the-art on methods and strategies for overcome the challenges that arise from the unique characteristics and conceptual design of vehicular networks.O vasto número de aplicações e cenários suportados pelas redes veiculares faz com que estas atraiam o interesse não só da comunidade científica, mas também dos governos e da indústria automóvel. A título de exemplo, estas podem ser usadas para a implementação de serviços e aplicações que podem ajudar os condutores dos veículos a tomar decisões nas estradas, para a disseminação de conteúdos publicitários, ou ainda, para permitir que existam comunicações em zonas rurais ou remotas onde não é possível ter uma infraestrutura de rede convencional. Contudo, as propriedades únicas das redes veiculares fazem com que seja necessário ultrapassar um conjunto de desafios que têm grande impacto na sua aplicabilidade. A maioria dos desafios que as redes veiculares enfrentam advêm da grande mobilidade dos veículos e da topologia de rede que está em constante mutação. Esta situação faz com que este tipo de rede seja suscetível de disrupção, que as oportunidades de contacto sejam escassas e de curta duração, e que a ligação seja intermitente. Fruto destas adversidades, a disseminação dos dados torna-se um tópico de investigação bastante promissor na área das redes veiculares e por esta mesma razão é abordada neste trabalho de investigação. O trabalho descrito nesta tese é motivado pela necessidade de propor novas abordagens para lidar com os problemas inerentes à disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares. Para garantir o sucesso da disseminação dos dados em ambientes veiculares é importante que este tipo de redes garanta a cooperação entre os nós da rede. Contudo, neste tipo de ambientes não é possível garantir um cenário totalmente cooperativo. Este cenário faz com que as redes veiculares sejam suscetíveis à presença de nós não cooperativos que comprometem seriamente o desempenho global da rede. Por outro lado, os nós cooperativos podem ver o seu desempenho comprometido por causa da sobrecarga de serviços que poderão suportar. Para tentar resolver alguns destes problemas, esta tese apresenta várias propostas e estudos sobre o impacto de estratégias de cooperação, monitorização e gestão de rede no desempenho das redes veiculares com ligações intermitentes (Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks - VDTNs). O objetivo das propostas apresentadas nesta tese é melhorar o desempenho global da rede. Em particular, as estratégias de cooperação e gestão de rede são exploradas para melhorar e optimizar o uso dos recursos da rede. Ficou demonstrado que o uso deste tipo de estratégias e metodologias contribui para um aumento significativo do desempenho da rede, não só em termos de agregados de pacotes (“bundles”) entregues, mas também na diminuição do volume de recursos desperdiçados. Os resultados observados neste trabalho procuram contribuir para o avanço do estado da arte em métodos e estratégias que visam ultrapassar alguns dos desafios que advêm das propriedades e desenho conceptual das redes veiculares

Recent Advances in Cellular D2D Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communications have attracted a great deal of attention from researchers in recent years. It is a promising technique for offloading local traffic from cellular base stations by allowing local devices, in physical proximity, to communicate directly with each other. Furthermore, through relaying, D2D is also a promising approach to enhancing service coverage at cell edges or in black spots. However, there are many challenges to realizing the full benefits of D2D. For one, minimizing the interference between legacy cellular and D2D users operating in underlay mode is still an active research issue. With the 5th generation (5G) communication systems expected to be the main data carrier for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm, the potential role of D2D and its scalability to support massive IoT devices and their machine-centric (as opposed to human-centric) communications need to be investigated. New challenges have also arisen from new enabling technologies for D2D communications, such as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and blockchain technologies, which call for new solutions to be proposed. This edited book presents a collection of ten chapters, including one review and nine original research works on addressing many of the aforementioned challenges and beyond

Extending cloud-based applications in challenged environments with mobile opportunistic networks

With the tremendous growth of mobile devices, e.g, smartphones, tablets and PDAs in recent years, users are looking for more advanced platforms in order to use their computational applications (e.g., processing and storage) in a faster and more convenient way. In addition, mobile devices are capable of using cloud-based applications and the use of such technology is growing in popularity. However, one major concern is how to efficiently access these cloud-based applications when using a resource-constraint mobile device. Essentially applications require a continuous Internet connection which is difficult to obtain in challenged environments that lack an infrastructure for communication (e.g., in sparse or rural areas) or areas with infrastructure (e.g., urban or high density areas) with restricted/full of interference access networks and even areas with high costs of Internet roaming. In these situations the use of mobile opportunistic networks may be extended to avail cloud-based applications to the user. In this thesis we explore the emergence of extending cloud-based applications with mobile opportunistic networks in challenged environments and observe how local user’s social interactions and collaborations help to improve the overall message delivery performance in the network. With real-world trace-driven simulations, we compare and contrast the different user’s behaviours in message forwarding, the impact of the various network loads (e.g., number of messages) along with the long-sized messages and the impact of different wireless networking technologies, in various opportunistic routing protocols in a challenged environment

Cooperative Radio Communications for Green Smart Environments

The demand for mobile connectivity is continuously increasing, and by 2020 Mobile and Wireless Communications will serve not only very dense populations of mobile phones and nomadic computers, but also the expected multiplicity of devices and sensors located in machines, vehicles, health systems and city infrastructures. Future Mobile Networks are then faced with many new scenarios and use cases, which will load the networks with different data traffic patterns, in new or shared spectrum bands, creating new specific requirements. This book addresses both the techniques to model, analyse and optimise the radio links and transmission systems in such scenarios, together with the most advanced radio access, resource management and mobile networking technologies. This text summarises the work performed by more than 500 researchers from more than 120 institutions in Europe, America and Asia, from both academia and industries, within the framework of the COST IC1004 Action on "Cooperative Radio Communications for Green and Smart Environments". The book will have appeal to graduates and researchers in the Radio Communications area, and also to engineers working in the Wireless industry. Topics discussed in this book include: • Radio waves propagation phenomena in diverse urban, indoor, vehicular and body environments• Measurements, characterization, and modelling of radio channels beyond 4G networks• Key issues in Vehicle (V2X) communication• Wireless Body Area Networks, including specific Radio Channel Models for WBANs• Energy efficiency and resource management enhancements in Radio Access Networks• Definitions and models for the virtualised and cloud RAN architectures• Advances on feasible indoor localization and tracking techniques• Recent findings and innovations in antenna systems for communications• Physical Layer Network Coding for next generation wireless systems• Methods and techniques for MIMO Over the Air (OTA) testin

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity