Xiuchao Wu

Analysis of smartphone user mobility traces for opportunistic data collection in wireless sensor networks

The increasing ubiquity of smartphones coupled with the mobility of their users will allow the use of smartphones to enhance the operation of wireless sensor networks. In addition to accessing data from a wireless sensor network for personal use, and the generation of data through participatory sensing, we propose the use of smartphones to collect data from sensor nodes opportunistically. For this to be feasible, the mobility patterns of smartphone users must support opportunistic use. We analyze the dataset from the Mobile Data Challenge by Nokia, and we identify the significant patterns, including strong spatial and temporal localities. These patterns should be exploited when designing protocols and algorithms, and their existence supports the proposal for opportunistic data collection through smartphones.

SNIP: A Sensor Node-Initiated Probing mechanism for opportunistic data collection in sparse wireless sensor networks

In many potential wireless sensor network applications, the cost of the base station infrastructure can be prohibitive. Instead, we consider the opportunistic use of mobile devices carried by people in daily life to collect sensor data. As the movement of these mobile nodes is by definition uncontrolled, contact probing is a challenging task, particularly for sensor nodes which need to be duty-cycled to achieve long life. We propose a Sensor Node-Initiated Probing mechanism for improving the contact capacity when the duty cycle of a sensor node is fixed. In contrast to existing mobile node-initiated probing mechanisms, in which the mobile node broadcasts a beacon periodically, in SNIP the sensor node broadcasts a beacon each time its radio is turned on according to its duty cycle. We study SNIP through both analysis and network simulation. The evaluation results indicate that SNIP performs much better than mobile-initiated probing. When the fixed duty cycle is lower than 1%, the probed contact capacity can be increased by an order of 2–10; alternatively, SNIP can achieve the same amount of probed contact capacity with much less energy consumption.

TCP HandOff: A Practical TCP Enhancement for Heterogeneous Mobile Environments

In recent years, many different kinds of wireless access networks have been deployed for the Internet and have become inseparable parts of the Internet. But TCP, the most widely used transport protocol of the Internet, was designed for stationery hosts. In particular, TCP faces severe challenges when user moves around in these networks and handoff occurs frequently. In this paper, TCP handoff (TCP-HO), a practical end-to-end mechanism, is proposed for improving TCP performance in heterogeneous mobile environments. TCP-HO assumes that a mobile host is able to detect the completion of handoff immediately and has a coarse estimation of new wireless links bandwidth. When a mobile host detects handoff completion, it will immediately notify the server through two duplicate ACKs, whose TCP option also carries the bandwidth of new wireless link. After receiving this notification, the server begins to transmit immediately and keeps updating ssthresh according to the bandwidth from mobile host and its new RTT samples. This updating will be stopped after four RTT samples or after congestion is detected. TCP-HO has been implemented in FreeBSD 5.4. Experimental results show that TCP-HO does improve TCP performance without adversely affecting cross traffic in a heterogeneous mobile environment.

Sync-TCP: A new approach to high speed congestion control

As bandwidth in the Internet continues to grow, there will be more and more long fat network pipes with abundant residual bandwidth. At the same time, there is also a gradual and steady increase in the deployment of Internet endpoints equipped with different variants of high speed TCP.

Exploiting Rush Hours for Energy-Efficient Contact Probing in Opportunistic Data Collection

In many potential wireless sensor network applications, the cost of the base station infrastructure can be prohibitive. Instead, we consider the use of mobile devices carried by people in their daily life to collect sensor data opportunistically. As the movement of these mobile nodes is, by definition, uncontrolled, contact probing becomes a challenging task, particularly for sensor nodes which need to be aggressively duty-cycled to achieve long life. It has been reported that when the duty-cycle of a sensor node is fixed, SNIP, a sensor node-initiated probing mechanism, performs much better than mobile node-initiated probing mechanisms. Considering that the intended applications are delay-tolerant, mobile nodes tend to follow some repeated mobility patterns, and contacts are distributed unevenly in temporal, SNIP-RH is proposed in this paper to further improve the performance of contact probing through exploiting Rush Hours during which contacts arrive more frequently. In SNIP-RH, SNIP is activated only when the time is within Rush Hours and there are enough data to be uploaded in the next probed contact. As for the duty-cycle, it is selected based on the mean of contact length that is learned on line. Both analysis and simulation results indicate that under a typical simulated road-side wireless sensor network scenario, SNIP-RH can significantly reduce the energy consumed for probing the contacts, that are necessary for uploading the sensed data, or significantly increase the probed contact capacity under a sensor nodes energy budget for contact probing.

Data Pre-Forwarding for Opportunistic Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Opportunistic data collection in wireless sensor networks uses passing smartphones to collect data from sensor nodes, thus avoiding the cost of multiple static sink nodes. Based on the observed mobility patterns of smartphone users, sensor data should be preforwarded to the nodes that are visited more frequently with the aim of improving network throughput. In this article, we construct a formal network model and an associated theoretical optimization problem to maximize the throughput subject to energy constraints of sensor nodes. Since a centralized controller is not available in opportunistic data collection, data pre-forwarding (DPF) must operate as a distributed mechanism in which each node decides when and where to forward data based on local information. Hence, we develop a simple distributed DPF mechanism with two heuristic algorithms, implement this proposal in Contiki-OS, and evaluate it thoroughly. We demonstrate empirically, in simulations, that our approach is close to the optimal solution obtained by a centralized algorithm. We also demonstrate that this approach performs well in scenarios based on real mobility traces of smartphone users. Finally, we evaluate our proposal on a small laboratory testbed, demonstrating that the distributed DPF mechanism with heuristic algorithms performs as predicted by simulations, and thus that it is a viable technique for opportunistic data collection through smartphones.

Data pre-forwarding for opportunistic data collection in wireless sensor networks

In many potential wireless sensor network applications, the cost of the base station infrastructure can be prohibitive. Instead, we consider the use of mobile devices carried by people in their daily life to collect sensor reports opportunistically. Considering that human mobility demonstrates strong spatial locality and sensor nodes need to be deeply duty-cycled for longevity, data pre-forwarding (DPF), in which sensor reports are forwarded to sensor nodes visited by people more frequently even though they are not currently being visited, should be a promising scheme to improve the performance of opportunistic data collection. In this paper, a distributed DPF mechanism is proposed to exploit the spatial locality of human mobility in the context of opportunistic data collection. The communication protocol is first carefully designed so that sensor nodes could rendezvous and communicate with their neighbors and mobile nodes energy efficiently. A simple heuristic algorithm is then designed so that sensor nodes could decide the number of sensor reports exchanged with their direct neighbors for improving network throughput under the energy constraint of sensor nodes. The distributed DPF mechanism has been implemented in Contiki-OS and evaluated with Cooja. Evaluation results indicate that this proposal significantly outperforms the default approach (with no data pre-forwarding).

A Shared Opportunistic Infrastructure for Long-Lived Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a Shared Opportunistic Infrastructure (SOI) is proposed to reduce total cost of ownership for long-lived wireless sensor networks through exploiting human mobility. More specifically, various sensor nodes are opportunistically connected with their corresponding servers through smart phones carried by people in their daily life. In this paper, we will introduce the motivations, present the architecture, discuss the feasibility, and identify several research opportunities of SOI.

Experimental evaluation of TCP performance over 10Gb/s passive optical networks (XG-PON)

XG-PON is the next-generation standard for passive optical networks operating at 10Gb/s and TCP is the dominant transport protocol of the Internet. In this paper, we present the first performance evaluation of TCP over XG-PON, considering efficiency, fairness, responsiveness, and convergence. The impact of XG-PONs large delay-bandwidth product and asymmetric bandwidth provision are assessed, together with the dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism. Our state-of-the-art NS3 simulation uses real implementations of three TCP variants (Reno, CUBIC and H-TCP) from the Network Simulation Cradle. Our results highlight several issues that arise for TCP over XG-PON, and emphasise the need for improved awareness of medium access control and scheduling in the context of specific TCP congestion control behaviour.

Improving TCP performance in heterogeneous mobile environments by exploiting the explicit cooperation between server and mobile host

In recent years, many different kinds of wireless access networks have been deployed and become inseparable parts of the Internet. But TCP, the most widely used transport protocol of the Internet, was designed for stationery hosts. It faces severe challenges when user moves around in these networks and handoff occurs frequently. In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits of bringing explicit cooperation between TCP server and mobile host. For this purpose, TCP HandOff (TCP-HO), a practical end-to-end mechanism, is designed for improving TCP performance in heterogeneous mobile environments. TCP-HO assumes that a mobile host is able to detect the completion of handoff immediately and has a coarse estimation of new wireless links bandwidth. When a mobile host detects handoff completion, it will immediately notify the server through two duplicate ACKs, whose TCP option also carries the bandwidth of new wireless link. After receiving this notification, the server begins to transmit immediately and keeps updating ssthresh according to the bandwidth from mobile host and its new RTT samples. This update will end after four RTT samples or after congestion is detected. TCP-HO has been implemented in FreeBSD 5.4. Experimental results indicate that in heterogeneous mobile environments, TCP-HO can improve TCP performance a lot without adversely affecting cross traffic even when mobile host only has a coarse estimation of new wireless links bandwidth. Considering that more and more users are accessing the Internet through heterogeneous wireless networks and mobile host could have a coarse estimation of wireless links bandwidth, it should be worthwhile to change both server and mobile host for improving TCP performance.