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

Location-based Data Analysis of Visitor Structure for Recreational Area Management

This work presents a location-based data analysis framework for profiling visitors structures. In terms of recreational area management, understanding visitors’ structure and popularity is important. Traditionally, visitors monitoring with automatic counting devices has drawbacks of inaccurate visitors counting. In this work, compared to automatic counting devices, we use Wi-Fi tracking as the main method to count visitors, which provides a fairly precise picture of visitor structures. Moreover, we deliver rich analytic functions in this framework and we present the functionality with visitor data collected from Guanyinshan Visitor Center. This framework not only standardizes visitor counting process but also facilitates a profound analysis of visitor structures. Key Words: Guanyinshan Visitor Center, Wi-Fi trackin

The stability region of the delay in Pareto opportunistic networks

The intermeeting time, i.e., the time between two consecutive contacts between a pair of nodes, plays a fundamental role in the delay of messages in opportunistic networks. A desirable property of message delay is that its expectation is finite, so that the performance of the system can be predicted. Unfortunately, when intermeeting times feature a Pareto distribution, this property does not always hold. In this paper, assuming heterogeneous mobility and Pareto intermeeting times, we provide a detailed analysis of the conditions for the expectation of message delay to be finite (i.e., to converge) when social-oblivious or social-aware forwarding schemes are used. More specifically, we consider different classes of social-oblivious and social-aware schemes, based on the number of hops allowed and the number of copies generated. Our main finding is that, in terms of convergence, allowing more than two hops may provide advantages only in the social-aware case. At the same time, we show that using a multi-copy scheme can in general improve the convergence of the expected delay. We also compare social-oblivious and social-aware strategies from the convergence standpoint and we prove that, depending on the mobility scenario considered, social-aware schemes may achieve convergence while social-oblivious cannot, and vice versa. Finally, we apply the derived convergence conditions to three popular contact data sets available in the literature (Cambridge, Infocom, and RollerNet), assessing the convergence of each class of forwarding protocols in these three cases

Protocol for a Systematic Literature Review on Security-related Research in Ubiquitous Computing

Context: This protocol is as a supplementary document to our review paper that investigates security-related challenges and solutions that have occurred during the past decade (from January 2003 to December 2013). Objectives: The objective of this systematic review is to identify security-related challenges, security goals and defenses in ubiquitous computing by answering to three main research questions. First, demographic data and trends will be given by analyzing where, when and by whom the research has been carried out. Second, we will identify security goals that occur in ubiquitous computing, along with attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that have motivated the research. Finally, we will examine the differences in addressing security in ubiquitous computing with those in traditional distributed systems. Method: In order to provide an overview of security-related challenges, goals and solutions proposed in the literature, we will use a systematic literature review (SLR). This protocol describes the steps which are to be taken in order to identify papers relevant to the objective of our review. The first phase of the method includes planning, in which we define the scope of our review by identifying the main research questions, search procedure, as well as inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data extracted from the relevant papers are to be used in the second phase of the method, data synthesis, to answer our research questions. The review will end by reporting on the results. Results and conclusions: The expected results of the review should provide an overview of attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that occur in ubiquitous computing and that have motivated the research in the last decade. Moreover, the review will indicate which security goals are gaining on their significance in the era of ubiquitous computing and provide a categorization of the security-related countermeasures, mechanisms and techniques found in the literature. (authors' abstract)Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operation

Mobile Social Networking aided content dissemination in heterogeneous networks

Since more and more mobile applications are based on the proliferation of social information, the study of Mobile Social Net-works (MSNs) combines social sciences and wireless communications. Operating wireless networks more efficiently by exploiting social relationships between MSN users is an appealing but challenging option for network operators. An MSN-aided content dissemination technique is presented as a potential ex-tension of conventional cellular wireless net-works in order to satisfy growing data traffic. By allowing the MSN users to create a self-organized ad hoc network for spontaneously disseminating contents, the network operator may be able to reduce the operational costs and simultaneously achieve an improved network performance. In this paper, we first summarize the basic features of the MSN architecture, followed by a survey of the factors which may affect MSN-aided content dissemination. Using a case study, we demonstrate that one can save resources of the Base Station (BS) while substantially lowering content dissemination delay. Finally, other potential applications of MSN-aided content dissemination are introduced, and a range of future challenges are summarized