Recently, several problems concerning smart and connected communities (S&CC) have been studied. In many S&CC applications such as autonomous driving, mobile crowdsourcing and crowd sensing, the mobility of vehicles and pedestrians has large impact on their performance and reliability. Many research works have used mobility generators to simulate realistic mobility, and evaluated the performance and reliability of the proposed applications and protocols. Although such mobility generators might be useful for producing typical mobility patterns, those mobility patterns are just snapshots and they cover only some part in the possible mobility patterns. Since many S&CC applications are used as social systems, their reliability and efficiency are very important. In order to improve the reliability of such mobility aware applications and accurately evaluate their performance, we need to collect many mobility patterns via simulation and/or observation from the real world, analyze their mobility influence statistically and provide adequate design platforms. In this paper, we first show the fact that many research works adopt snapshot-based mobility analyses. Then we propose a technique to reproduce a large part of possible mobility patterns, and provide a design platform to analyze their features and develop high-reliable mobility aware applications for S&CC. Some experimental results are also given.

We propose an opportunistic ad hoc localization algorithm called Urban Pedestrians Localization (UPL), for estimating locations of mobile nodes in urban districts. The design principles of UPL are twofold. First, we assume that location landmarks are deployed sparsely due to deployment-cost constraints. Thus, most mobile nodes cannot expect to meet these location landmarks frequently. Each mobile node in UPL relies on location information received from its neighboring mobile nodes instead in order to estimate its area of presence in which the node is expected to exist. Although the area of presence of each mobile node becomes inexact as it moves, it can be used to reduce the areas of presence of the others. Second, we employ information about obstacles such as walls, and present an algorithm to calculate the movable areas of mobile nodes considering obstacles for predicting the area of presence of mobile nodes accurately under mobility. This also helps to reduce each node's area of presence. The experimental results have shown that UPL could be limited to 0.7r positioning error in average, where r denotes the radio range by the above two ideas.

This paper presents a vehicular positioning system in which multiple vehicles cooperatively calibrate their positions and recognize surrounding vehicles with their GPS receivers and ranging sensors. The proposed system operates in a distributed manner and works even if all vehicles nearby do not or cannot participate in the system. Each vehicle acquires various pieces of positioning information with different degrees of accuracies depending on the sources and recency of information, and compiles them based on likelihood derived from estimated accuracies to minimize estimation errors. A simulation based performance evaluation given in the paper shows that the proposed system improves the estimation accuracy by 85% on average with respect to the standalone GPS receiver, and recognizes about 70% surrounding vehicles with an error of 1m.

In this paper, we propose a new trajectory estimation method named TRADE (TRAjectory estimation in DEcentralized way). TRADE is a range-free localization algorithm in fully decentralized mobile ad hoc networks. In TRADE, each mobile node periodically transmits messages containing its estimated trajectory information, and re-computes its own trajectory using those from its neighbors. This information exchange considerably contributes to improvement of the position accuracy. Furthermore, we give the optimal design of the protocol based on the analysis of the algorithm property. Through the analysis, we consider how much trajectory information should be exchanged among nodes to estimate the position within a certain error range in the protocol design. We have evaluated the position accuracy under various settings, and have shown the effectiveness of the protocol in the real world through two realistic application examples.

In this paper, we propose an off-line algorithm called TRACKIE to estimate trajectories of mobile nodes based on encounter information. This method only assumes reasonable number of landmarks and ad-hoc wireless communication facility of mobile nodes, and does not rely on multi-hop ad-hoc networks nor global positioning system. The method achieves low-cost estimation of trajectories and provides accurate solution (the average estimation error was less than 40% of the wireless range in simulations). We have evaluated TRACKIE with Micaz Mote and shown that estimation error is about 2 m in real environments where wireless range is about 3 m.

In this paper, we propose a method for realistic mobility aware information gathering in disaster areas. In the proposed method, a disaster area is divided into a grid, and each node's safety information is held in its pre-defined home grid cells, and it can be referred by sending a query to mobile nodes in its home cells. In this paper, we propose an autonomous adaptable protocol so that it can adapt to a variety of realistic network environments. In order to achieve speedy and high propagation, we combine the notions of store/forward in opportunistic networks and geographical routing in MANETs. In the proposed protocol, if intermediate nodes cannot relay safety information to its home cells by multi-hop communication, they hold it until they meet preceding nodes and re-transmit it as proxies. If a shortest path is not available, a detour is autonomously found. We have evaluated the proposed method under realistic pedestrian flows using our network simulator MobiREAL, and shown that it can work well.

In this paper, we present a range-free ad-hoc localization algorithm called UPL (Urban Pedestrians Localization), for positioning mobile nodes in urban district. The design principle of UPL is two-fold. (1) We assume that location seeds are deployed sparsely due to deployment-cost constraints. Thus most mobile nodes cannot expect to meet these location seeds frequently. Therefore, each mobile node in UPL relies on location information received from its neighboring mobile nodes in order to estimate its area of presence. The area of presence of each mobile node becomes inexact as it moves, but it is helpful to reduce the areas of presence of the other mobile nodes. (2) To predict the area of presence of mobile nodes accurately under mobility, we employ information about obstacles such as walls, and present an algorithm to calculate the movable areas of mobile nodes considering obstacles. This also helps to reduce each node's area of presence. The experimental results have shown that by the above two ideas UPL could achieve 8mpositioning error in average with 10mof radio range.

In this paper, we propose an intervehicle information dissemination protocol called received message-dependent protocol (RMDP) that propagates the preceding traffic information to the following vehicles and discuss its performance. The proposed protocol autonomously changes the dissemination interval, depending on the number of reception messages and detected reception errors, in order to avoid message collision among vehicles. We have constructed a realistic simulation environment of intervehicle communication by combining a traffic-flow simulator and an ad hoc network simulator. Our simulation results show that, by using RMDP, a lot of vehicles can acquire their preceding traffic information within short periods at both the conditions with light and heavy traffic. In addition, we have also shown that selection policy of disseminated data affects preceding-traffic-information acquisition time. Each vehicle holds other vehicles' traces for some period. Depending on the number of preserved other vehicles' traces and their preserved periods, the propagation ratio of the preceding traffic information varies. Some simulation results are explained.

We have proposed realistic mobility models and developed a network simulator called MobiREAL for performance evaluation of MANET applications. Simulator users can easily generate a mobility scenario on any city section with the support tool of MobiREAL and can easily analyze the impact of mobility through the simulation visualization tool of MobiREAL. In this demonstration, we will show the usefulness of MobiREAL and importance to simulate MANET applications in realistic environments.

In this demonstration, we present cellular phone applications developed on top of our middleware, and show the usefulness of the proposed group formation mechanism based on user’s context and group communication. Our middleware allows application programmers to efficiently develop cooperative applications consisting of a large number of cell phone terminals. To cope with several restrictions of cellular phones, our middleware allows application software to be executed separately on a server and user terminals. Group communication is implemented as interprocess communication on the server, and only the userinterface parts are executed on the cellular phones.

In this paper, we propose middleware for efficient and robust distributed network monitoring. In our technique, we specify network monitoring items, detection methods of viruses and DDoS attacks and the corresponding reactive actions as a management scenario. At the same time, we specify logical neighboring relations between separate network segments so that we can efficiently detect problems occurring in multiple segments. When a problem occurs in multiple network segments, the corresponding monitoring nodes form a group dynamically using logical relations. Based on the pre-defined management scenario, the nodes in the group carry out the reactive actions autonomously. We have designed and implemented our middleware consisting of several useful APIs. We have confirmed effectiveness of our technique through ns-2 simulation

In this paper, we propose an inter-vehicle ad-hoc communication protocol called RMDP (received message dependent protocol) which disseminates and propagates the preceding traffic information to the following vehicles, and discuss its performance. Our proposed protocol dynamically changes the dissemination interval depending on the number of reception messages for avoiding message collision in heavy traffic jam conditions. We design the parameters of the protocol based on the simulation results. Our simulation results show that by using RMDP, a lot of vehicles can acquire the preceding traffic information within very short periods. In addition, we have also shown that selection of disseminate data affects preceding traffic information acquiring time. Each vehicle holds other vehicles' tracks for some period. Depending on the number of preserved other vehicles' tracks and their preserved period, propagation ratio of the preceding traffic information varies. Some simulation results are explained.

In this paper, we propose a method for partitioning a given application program that exceeds resource limits of mobile terminals into two module sets. Only a part of modules of the given application is assigned on a mobile terminal and the rest of modules are running on its proxy server, and that the mobile terminal invokes the modules on the server using remote method invocation. It is desirable that we can minimize the total amount of communication, delay time and power consumption between the mobile terminal and its server (here, we call the total amount as the total cost). In the proposed technique, first, a given Java program is repeatedly simulated on a single machine, and we collect the statistics information to estimate the total cost. Then, we give the resource limitation of the mobile terminal such as the memory size and an objective function that shows what total cost should be minimized. Under those constraints, our tool divides optimized division by using simulated annealing (SA). We have applied our technique to some application programs and examined its usefulness by evaluating their total costs.

Due to the progress of portable computing devices such as PDAs, cellular phones and small sized PCs, many personal navigation systems have been developed which navigate their users to display routes to given destinations. Those navigation systems mainly focus on the guidance for personal use. In this paper, we have developed a group navigation system, which provides facilities for (1) personally customizable route navigation to a given destination, (2) management of group movement and (3) rehearsal usage when we make the personally customized route navigation. In our system, using wireless ad-hoc communication a few leaders of a group can collect and distribute the information about its members' current positions and give each member a suitable suggestion when the user is losing his/her way. The personalized route navigation scenario (program) running on portable devices can be obtained automatically only by clicking intersections sequentially on a given map and giving pictures and comments. A rehearsal mode is also prepared when we make the personalized route navigation.

In this paper, we propose a middleware library for efficiently developing distributed cooperative applications consisting of a large number of cellular phone users. Our middleware provides: (1) a dynamic group formation mechanism depending on users' locations and preferred subjects; and (2) a group communication mechanism called multiway synchronization for multicasting, synchronization and mutual exclusion. Most of Java executors on cellular phones do not support direct communication among user programs. Usable resources are also restricted. Therefore, in our middleware, most of user programs are executed on their servers as agents. Group communication is implemented as inter-process communication on the server, and only the user-interface parts are executed on the cellular phones.