Eugenio Magistretti

Mobeyes: smart mobs for urban monitoring with a vehicular sensor network

Vehicular sensor networks are emerging as a new network paradigm of primary relevance, especially for proactively gathering monitoring information in urban environments. Vehicles typically have no strict constraints on processing power and storage capabilities. They can sense events (e.g., imaging from streets), process sensed data (e.g., recognizing license plates), and route messages to other vehicles (e.g., diffusing relevant notification to drivers or police agents). In this novel and challenging mobile environment, sensors can generate a sheer amount of data, and traditional sensor network approaches for data reporting become unfeasible. This article proposes MobEyes, an efficient lightweight support for proactive urban monitoring based on the primary idea of exploiting vehicle mobility to opportunistically diffuse summaries about sensed data. The reported experimental/analytic results show that MobEyes can harvest summaries and build a low-cost distributed index with reasonable completeness, good scalability, and limited overhead

Dissemination and Harvesting of Urban Data Using Vehicular Sensing Platforms

Recent advances in vehicular communications make it possible to realize vehicular sensor networks, i.e., collaborative environments where mobile vehicles that are equipped with sensors of different nature (from toxic detectors to still/video cameras) interwork to implement monitoring applications. In particular, there is an increasing interest in proactive urban monitoring, where vehicles continuously sense events from urban streets, autonomously process sensed data (e.g., recognizing license plates), and, possibly, route messages to vehicles in their vicinity to achieve a common goal (e.g., to allow police agents to track the movements of specified cars). This challenging environment requires novel solutions with respect to those of more-traditional wireless sensor nodes. In fact, unlike conventional sensor nodes, vehicles exhibit constrained mobility, have no strict limits on processing power and storage capabilities, and host sensors that may generate sheer amounts of data, thus making already-known solutions for sensor network data reporting inapplicable. This paper describes MobEyes, which is an effective middleware that was specifically designed for proactive urban monitoring and exploits node mobility to opportunistically diffuse sensed data summaries among neighbor vehicles and to create a low-cost index to query monitoring data. We have thoroughly validated the original MobEyes protocols and demonstrated their effectiveness in terms of indexing completeness, harvesting time, and overhead. In particular, this paper includes (1) analytic models for MobEyes protocol performance and their consistency with simulation-based results, (2) evaluation of performance as a function of vehicle mobility, (3) effects of concurrent exploitation of multiple harvesting agents with single/multihop communications, (4) evaluation of network overhead and overall system stability, and (5) performance validation of MobEyes in a challenging urban tracking application where the police reconstruct the movements of a suspicious driver, e.g., by specifying the license number of a car.

WiFi-Nano: reclaiming WiFi efficiency through 800 ns slots

The increase in WiFi physical layer transmission speeds from 1~Mbps to 1 Gbps has reduced transmission times for a 1500 byte packet from 12 ms to 12 us. However, WiFi MAC overheads such as channel access and acks have not seen similar reductions and cumulatively contribute about 150 us on average per packet. Thus, the efficiency of WiFi has deteriorated from over 80% at 1 Mbps to under 10% at 1 Gbps. In this paper, we propose WiFi-Nano, a system that uses 800 ns slots} to significantly improve WiFi efficiency. Reducing slot time from 9 us to 800 ns makes backoffs efficient, but clear channel assessment can no longer be completed in one slot since preamble detection can now take multiple slots. Instead of waiting for multiple slots for detecting preambles, nodes speculatively transmit preambles as their backoff counters expire, while continuing to detect premables using self-interference cancellation. Upon detection of preambles from other transmitters, nodes simply abort their own preamble transmissions, thereby allowing the earliest transmitter to succeed. Further, receivers speculatively transmit their ack preambles at the end of packet reception, thereby reducing ack overhead. We validate the effectiveness of WiFi-Nano through implementation on an FPGA-based software defined radio platform, and through extensive simulations, demonstrate efficiency gains of up to 100%.

802.11ec: collision avoidance without control messages

In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate 802.11ec (Encoded Control), an 802.11-based protocol without control messages: Instead, 802.11ec employs correlatable symbol sequences that, together with the timing the codes are transmitted, encode all control information and change the fundamental design properties of the MAC. The use of correlatable symbol sequences provides two key advantages: 1) efficiency, as it permits a near order of magnitude reduction of the control time; 2) robustness, because codes are short and easily detectable even at low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and even while a neighbor is transmitting data. We implement 802.11ec on a field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based software defined radio. We perform a large number of experiments and show that, compared to 802.11 (with and without RTS/CTS), 802.11ec achieves a vast efficiency gain in conveying control information and resolves key throughput and fairness problems in the presence of hidden terminals, asymmetric topologies, and general multihop topologies.

A Mobile Delay-Tolerant Approach to Long-Term Energy-Efficient Underwater Sensor Networking

Underwater environment represents a challenging and promising application scenario for sensor networks. Due to hard constraints imposed by acoustic communications and to high power consumption of acoustic modems, in underwater sensor networks (USN) energy saving becomes even more critical than in traditional sensor networks. In this paper the authors propose delay-tolerant data dolphin (DDD), an approach to apply delay-tolerant networking in the resource-constrained underwater environment. DDD exploits the mobility of a small number of capable collector nodes (namely dolphins) to harvest information sensed by low power sensor devices, while saving sensor battery power. DDD avoids energy-expensive multi-hop relaying by requiring sensors to perform only one-hop transmissions when a dolphin is within their transmission range. The paper presents simulation results to evaluate the effectiveness of randomly moving dolphins for data collection.

REDMAN: An optimistic replication middleware for read-only resources in dense MANETs

The spread of wireless portable devices is pushing towards service provisioning over dense Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), i.e., limited spatial regions, such as shopping malls and airports, where a high number of mobile peers can autonomously cooperate without a statically deployed network infrastructure. The paper proposes the REDMAN middleware to manage, retrieve, and disseminate replicas of data/service components to cooperating nodes in a dense MANET. The guideline is to exploit high node population to enable optimistic lightweight resource replication capable of tolerating node exits/failures. REDMAN adopts original approximated solutions, specifically designed for dense MANET, that have demonstrated good scalability and limited overhead for dense MANET configuration (node identification and manager election), for replica distribution/retrieval, and for lazily consistent replica degree maintenance.

REDMAN: a decentralized middleware solution for cooperative replication in dense MANETs

The mass market of wireless devices is pushing towards service provisioning over dense mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), i.e., limited spatial regions, such as university campuses, airports and shopping malls, where many mobile wireless peers autonomously cooperate, without the need of statically deployed support infrastructures. Dense MANETs can take advantage of high node population to replicate resources of common interest to increase their availability overcoming unpredictable node movements. The paper proposes a lightweight application-level middleware, called REDMAN, to manage, retrieve and disseminate replicas of data and service components transparently from the point of view of service developers, thus facilitating the realization of scalable distributed applications for dense MANETs. REDMAN proposes novel lightweight solutions, specific for and effective in dense MANETs, to determine dense region boundaries, to perform resource cloning/distribution/retrieval, and to approximately maintain the desired resource replication degree.

Time-Critical Underwater Sensor Diffusion with No Proactive Exchanges and Negligible Reactive Floods

In this paper we study multi-hop ad hoc routing in a Underwater Sensor Network (UWSN), a novel network paradigm for ad hoc underwater investigation with a large number of low cost underwater sensors. In UWSN, sensors are mobile with water current and dispersion, and use a wireless acoustic channel for communications. However, the large propagation latency and very low bandwidth of an acoustic channel could cause widespread collisions. Moreover, the mobility of sensors requires route management and causes additional traffic, thus worsening the situation. In this paper, we propose Under-Water Diffusion (UWD), a multi-hop ad hoc routing and in-network processing protocol. Since any on-demand flood or proactive exchange is considered harmful in underwater, UWD uses no proactive routing message exchange and negligible amount of ondemand floods in the environment with homogeneous GPSfree nodes and random node mobility. We validate UWD through both the mathematical analysis and simulations.

A k-hop Clustering Protocol for Dense Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Dense Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANET), i.e., geographical areas with relatively high and almost constant density of mobile terminals communicating in ad-hoc mode (such as in airport terminals, shopping malls, and university campuses) are becoming deployment scenarios of growing and growing commercial interest. The effective determination of k-hop clusters in MANET is crucial to efficiently support many relevant tasks, e.g., packet routing, and has recently started to be investigated. The paper claims that the assumption of dense MANET permits to propose novel k-hop clustering solutions that outperform existing ones in terms of both effectiveness and limited overhead. In particular, the paper presents an innovative k-clustering protocol, based on circle covering, and quantitatively evaluates its performance when adopting different decentralized heuristics. The proposed protocol, coupled with original heuristics considering the positions of neighbor cluster-heads, has demonstrated to achieve better performance than other solutions in the literature with a significantly lower message overhead.

Comparing and evaluating lightweight solutions for replica dissemination and retrieval in dense MANETs

There is an emerging market interest in service provisioning over dense mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), i.e., limited spatial regions, such as shopping malls, airports, and university campuses, where a high number of mobile wireless peers can autonomously cooperate without exploiting statically deployed network infrastructures. We claim that it is possible to exploit the high node population of dense MANETs to simplify the replication of common interest resources, in order to increase availability notwithstanding unpredictable node exits from dense regions. To this purpose, we have developed the REDMAN middleware that supports the lightweight and dense MANET-specific management, dissemination and retrieval of replicas of data/service components. In particular, the paper focuses on the presentation of different solutions for replica retrieval and for dissemination of replica placement information. We have compared and quantitatively evaluated the presented solutions by considering their ability to retrieve available replicas and their communication overhead. The original SID solution has demonstrated to outperform the others in dense MANETs and has been integrated in the REDMAN prototype.