Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a prevalent technology in various applications due to its low power consumption and wide device compatibility. Despite its numerous advantages, the encryption methods of BLE often expose devices to potential attacks. To fortify security, we investigate the application of Physical-layer Key Generation (PKG), a promising technology that enables devices to generate a shared secret key from their shared physical environment. Although extensively investigated, PKG is generally discussed in the context of Wi-Fi, and existing solutions for BLE demonstrate significantly lower performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a distinctive approach that capitalizes on the inherent characteristics of BLE to facilitate efficient PKG. We utilize the constant tone extension within BLE protocols to extract comprehensive physical layer information and introduce an innovative method that employs Legendre polynomial quantization for PKG. This method facilitates the exchange of secret keys with a high key matching rate and a high key generation rate. The efficacy of our approach is validated through extensive experiments on a software-defined radio platform, underscoring its potential to enhance security in the rapidly expanding field of BLE applications. A pilot study on commercial off-the-shelf BLE devices further validates the system's practicality, revealing important trade-offs between performance and hardware constraints in real-world deployments.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) can enhance Internet of Things (IoT) applications by efficiently extracting valuable information from excessively long videos captured by IoT cameras. Due to the large volume of video data and the high computation overhead of VLMs, a practical deployment strategy is to transmit the video to the cloud only on demand and also deploy the VLMs on the cloud for video analytics. Yet, the interaction experience between humans and VLMs is degraded by the high latency in such cloud-edge collaboration applications. The latency is caused by both the video transmission process and the heavy VLM inference process. We propose SwiftReTaKe, a two-round transmission framework coupled with a low-latency pre-pruning strategy to reduce both network and inference latency. By first sending keyframes for relevance estimation and then adaptively transmitting informative frames, SwiftReTaKe minimizes data transfer and LLM computation. Compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) long video processing method, SwiftReTaKe reduces the latency by 6 times with only 3.33% accuracy drop.

Neural enhancement through super-resolution (SR) deep neural networks (DNNs) opens up new possibilities for ultra-high-definition (UHD) live streaming. Yet, the heavy SR DNN inference overhead leads to severe deployment challenges. To reduce the overhead, existing systems propose to apply DNN-based SR only on carefully selected anchor frames while upscaling non-anchor frames via the lightweight reusing-based SR approach. However, frame-level scheduling is coarse-grained and fails to deliver optimal efficiency. In this work, we propose Palantír, the first neural-enhanced UHD live streaming system with fine-grained patch-level scheduling.

Amidst global warming and escalating extreme weather events, indoor environmental quality’s impact on human health and public hygiene gains prominence. Environmental parameters exist essentially as fields, which are characterized by high dimensionality, density and complexity, and contain massive amounts of information in space. To facilitate visualization and analysis of indoor environmental field, we design and implement BuildEnVR, an immersive analysis system by virtual reality, enabling remote analysis of real-time and historical environmental field data. Grounded in user needs and cognitive psychology, three visualization modes emerge: the Virtual Sensor mode enables users to access perceptual data in real-time at any 3D coordinates in ambient space, the 4D Heatmap mode visualizes spatial variations and trends over time in environmental field data, and the Synaesthesia mode realizes the fusion display of multi-dimensional environmental field data, allowing users to quickly understand the overall condition of the indoor environment with a low cognitive load. Extensive user surveys validate BuildEnVR’s intuitiveness and precision, and it is suitable for both experts and general users.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a prevalent technology in various applications due to its low power consumption and wide device compatibility. Despite its numerous advantages, the encryption methods of BLE often expose devices to potential attacks. To fortify security, we investigate the application of Physical-layer Key Generation (PKG), a promising technology that enables devices to generate a shared secret key from their shared physical environment. We propose a distinctive approach that capitalizes on the inherent characteristics of BLE to facilitate efficient PKG. We harness the constant tone extension within BLE protocols to extract comprehensive physical layer information and introduce an innovative method that employs Legendre polynomial quantization for PKG. This method facilitates the exchange of secret keys with a high key matching rate and a high key generation rate. The efficacy of our approach is validated through extensive experiments on a software-defined radio platform, underscoring its potential to enhance security in the rapidly expanding field of BLE applications.

Streaming services have billions of mobile subscribers, yet video piracy has cost service providers billions. Digital Rights Management (DRM), however, is still far from satisfactory. Unlike DRM, which attempts to prohibit the creation of pirated copies, fingerprinting may be used to track out the source of piracy. Nevertheless, existing fingerprinting-based streaming systems are not widely used since they fail to serve numerous users. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of StreamingTag, a scalable piracy tracing system for mobile streaming services. StreamingTag adopts a segment-level fingerprint embedding scheme to remove the need of re-embedding the fingerprint into the video for each new viewer. The key innovations of StreamingTag include a scalable and CDN-friendly delivery framework, an accurate and lightweight temporal synchronization scheme, a polarized and randomized SVD watermarking scheme, and a collusion-resistant fingerprinting scheme. Experiment results show the good QoS of StreamingTag in terms of preparation latency, bandwidth consumption, and video fidelity. Compared with existing methods, the proposed three schemes improve the re-identification accuracy by 4-49x, the watermark extraction accuracy by 2.25x at most and 1.5x on average, and the recall rate of catching colluders by 26%.

The digital transformation of factories has greatly increased the number of peripherals that need to connect to a network for sensing or control, resulting in a growing demand for a new network category known as the Equipment Area Network (EAN). The EAN is characterized by its cable-free, high-capacity, low-latency, and low-power features. To meet these expectations, we presentBEANet, a novel solution designed specifically for EAN that combines a two-stage synchronization mechanism with a time division protocol. We implemented the system using commercially available Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) modules and evaluated its performance. Our results show that the network can support up to 150 peripherals with a packet reception rate of 95.4%, which is only 0.9% lower than collision-free BLE transmission. When the cycle time is set to 2 s, the average transmission latency for all peripherals is 0.1 s, while the power consumption is 18.9 μW, which is only half that of systems using LLDN or TSCH. Simulation results also demonstrate that BEANet has the potential to accommodate over 30,000 peripherals under certain configurations.

Streaming services have billions of mobile subscribers, yet video piracy has cost service providers billions. Digital Rights Management (DRM), however, is still far from satisfactory. Unlike DRM, which attempts to prohibit the creation of pirated copies, fingerprinting may be used to track out the source of piracy. Nevertheless, the idea of piracy tracing is not widely used at the moment, since existing fingerprinting-based streaming systems fail to serve numerous users. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of StreamingTag, a scalable piracy tracing system for mobile streaming services. StreamingTag adopts a segment-level fingerprint embedding scheme to remove the need of re-embedding the fingerprint into the video for each new viewer. The key innovations of StreamingTag include a scalable and CDN-friendly delivery framework, a polarized and randomized SVD watermarking scheme suitable for short segments, and a collusion-resistant fingerprinting scheme optimized for large-scale streaming services. Experiment results show the good QoS of StreamingTag in terms of preparation latency, bandwidth consumption, and video fidelity. Compared with existing SVD watermarking schemes, the proposed watermarking scheme improves the watermark extraction accuracy by 2.25x at most and 1.5x on average. Compared with existing collusion-resistant fingerprinting schemes, the proposed scheme catches more colluders and improves the recall rate by 26%.

Taxi-sharing allows occupied taxis to pick up new passengers on the fly, promising to reduce waiting time for taxi riders and increase productivity for drivers. However, it becomes more difficult to strike the balance between a driver’s profit and a passenger’s quality of service (QoS). In this article, we propose QA-Share, a QoS-aware taxi-sharing system, by addressing two important challenges. First, QA-Share maximizes driver profit and user experience at the same time. Second, QA-Share optimizes these two metrics by dynamically adapting its schedule as new requests arrive. To address these two challenges, we formulated the optimization problem using integer linear programming and derived the optimal solution under a small system scale. Moreover, we also designed a heuristic algorithm to deal with the situation where more passenger requests for taxi service come at the same time. We evaluate our approach with a real-world dataset in a Chinese city—Zhenjiang—that contains the GPS traces recorded by more than 3,000 taxis during a period of 3 months. The results show that both QoS and profit increase by 38% compared to the current schemes. Moreover, as the first study that has conducted simulations with real traces with a population of 3 million and 3,000 taxis, we prove that taxi-sharing is a viable approach in a medium-size city.

In recent years, mobile crowdsourcing has emerged as a powerful computation paradigm to harness human power to perform spatial tasks such as collecting real-time traffic information and checking product prices in a specific supermarket. A fundamental problem of mobile crowdsourcing is: When both tasks and crowd workers appear in the platforms dynamically, how to assign an appropriate set of tasks to each worker. Most existing studies focus on efficient assignment algorithms based on bipartite graph matching. However, they overlook an important fact that crowd workers might be unreliable. Thus, their task assignment schemes cannot ensure the overall quality. In this article, we investigate the Quality-aware Online Task Assignment (QAOTA) problem in mobile crowdsourcing. We propose a probabilistic model to measure the quality of tasks and a hitchhiking model to characterize workers’ behavior patterns. We model task assignment as a quality maximization problem and derive a polynomial-time online assignment algorithm. Through rigorous analysis, we prove that the proposed algorithm approximates the offline optimal solution with a competitive ratio of 10/7. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution through intensive experiments.

The wide adoption of smart devices with onboard cameras facilitates photo capturing and sharing, but greatly increases people's concern on privacy infringement. Here, we seek a solution to respect the privacy of persons being photographed in a smarter way that they can be automatically erased from photos captured by smart devices according to their intention. To make this work, we need to address three challenges: 1) how to enable users explicitly express their intentions without wearing any visible specialized tag, and 2) how to associate the intentions with persons in captured photos accurately and efficiently. Furthermore, 3) the association process itself should not cause portrait information leakage and should be accomplished in a privacy-preserving way. In this work, we design, develop, and evaluate a system, called COIN (Cloak Of INvisibility), that enables a user to flexibly express her privacy requirement and empowers the photo service provider (or image taker) to exert the privacy protection policy. Leveraging the visual distinguishability of people in the field-of-view and the dimension-order-independent property of vector similarity measurement, COIN achieves high accuracy and low overhead. We implement a prototype system, and our evaluation results on both the trace-driven and real-life experiments confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our system.

Crowdsensing applications require individuals to share local and personal sensing data with others to produce valuable knowledge and services. Meanwhile, it has raised concerns especially for location privacy. Users may wish to prevent privacy leak and publish as many non-sensitive contexts as possible. Simply suppressing sensitive contexts is vulnerable to the adversaries exploiting spatio-temporal correlations in the user's behavior. In this work, we present PLP, a crowdsensing scheme which preserves privacy while it maximizes the amount of data collection by filtering a user's context stream. PLP leverages a conditional random field to model the spatio-temporal correlations among the contexts, and proposes a speed-up algorithm to learn the weaknesses in the correlations. Even if the adversaries are strong enough to know the filtering system and the weaknesses, PLP can still provably preserve privacy, with little computational cost for online operations. PLP is evaluated and validated over two real-world smartphone context traces of 34 users. The experimental results show that PLP efficiently protects privacy without sacrificing much utility.

In this work, we design and develop Montage for real-time multi-user formation tracking and localization by off-the-shelf smartphones. Montage achieves submeter-level tracking accuracy by integrating temporal and spatial constraints from user movement vectorestimation and distance measuring. In Montage, we designed a suite of novel techniques to surmount a variety of challenges in real-time tracking, without infrastructure and fingerprints, and without any a priori user-specific (e.g., stride-length and phoneplacement) or site-specific (e.g., digitalized map) knowledge: (1) a coded audio tone to support multi-user tracking with minimal latency, in the presence of high noise, multi-path effect, and Doppler Shift, (2) an innovative stride-length and walking direction estimation method without a priori knowledge of user and site, and (3) a vector-based multi-user tracking scheme which connects successive localization snapshots to refine users' locations and generate continuous moving traces. We implemented, deployed, and evaluated Montage in both outdoor and indoor environment. Our experimental results (847 traces from 15 users) show that the stride-length estimated by Montage over all users has error within 9cm, and the moving-direction estimated by Montage is within 20 degrees. For real-time tracking, Montage provides meter-second-level formation tracking accuracy with off-the-shelf mobile phones.

Cardinality estimation is one of the fundamental problems in large-scale radio frequency identification systems. While many efforts have been made to achieve faster approximate counting, the accuracy of estimates itself has not received enough attention. Specifically, most state-of-the-art schemes share a two-phase paradigm implicitly or explicitly, which needs a rough estimate first and then refines it to a final estimate meeting the desired accuracy; we observe that the final estimate can largely deviate from the expectation due to the skewed rough estimate, i.e., the accuracy of final estimates is not rigorously bounded. This negative impact is hidden because former solutions either assume perfect rough estimates or rough estimates that can be produced by uniform random data or perfect hash functions that can turn any data into uniform random data. Unfortunately, both of them are hard to meet in practice. To address the above issues, we propose a novel scheme, namely, “rigorous and practical cardinality (RPC)” estimation. RPC adopts the two-phase paradigm, in which the rough estimate is derived in the first phase using pairwise-independent hashing. In the second phase, we employ t-wise-independent hashing to reinforce the rough estimate to meet arbitrary accuracy requirements. We validate the effectiveness and performance of RPC through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. The results show that the RPC can meet the desired accuracy all the time with diverse practical settings while previous designs fail with non-uniform data.

It has been a consensus that a certain relationship exists between personal emotions and usage pattern of the smartphone. Based on users’ emotions and personalities, more and more applications are developed to provide intelligent automation services on the smartphone, such as music recommendations or stranger introductions on social networking sites. Most existing work studies this relationship by learning large amounts of samples, which are manually labeled and collected from smartphone users. The manual labeling process, however, is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we propose iSelf, a system that provides a general service of automatic detection of a user’s emotions in cold-start conditions with a smartphone. With the technology of transfer learning, iSelf achieves high accuracy given only a few labeled samples. We also embed a hybrid public/personal inference engine and validation system into iSelf, to make it maintain updates continuously. Through extensive experiments in real traces, the inferring accuracy is tested above 74% and can be improved increasingly through validation and updates. The application program interface has been open online for other developers.

Many cloud platforms emerge to meet urgent requirements for large-volume personal image store, sharing and search. Though most would agree that images contain rich sensitive information (e.g., people, location and event) and people's privacy concerns hinder their participation into untrusted services, today's cloud platforms provide little support for image privacy protection. Facing large-scale images from multiple users, it is extremely challenging for the cloud to maintain the index structure and schedule parallel computation without learning anything about the image content and indices. In this work, we introduce a novel system PIC: A Privacy-preserving Image search system on Cloud, which is a step towards feasible cloud services which provide secure content-based large-scale image search with fine-grained access control. Users can search on others' images if they are authorized by the image owners. Majority of the computationally intensive jobs are handled by the cloud, and a querier can now simply send the query and receive the result. Specially, to deal with massive images, we design our system suitable for distributed and parallel computation and introduce several optimizations to further expedite the search process. Our security analysis and prototype system evaluation results show that PIC successfully protects the image privacy at a low cost of computation and communication.

The wide adoption of smart devices with onboard cameras facilitates photo capturing and sharing, but greatly increases people's concern on privacy infringement. Here we seek a solution to respect the privacy of persons being photographed in a smarter way that they can be automatically erased from photos captured by smart devices according to their requirements. To make this work, we need to address three challenges: 1) how to enable users explicitly express their privacy protection intentions without wearing any visible specialized tag, and 2) how to associate the intentions with persons in captured photos accurately and efficiently. Furthermore, 3) the association process itself should not cause portrait information leakage and should be accomplished in a privacy-preserving way. In this work, we design, develop, and evaluate a system, called COIN (Cloak Of INvisibility), that enables a user to flexibly express her privacy requirement and empowers the photo service provider (or image taker) to exert the privacy protection policy. Leveraging the visual distinguishability of people in the field-of-view and the dimension-order-independent property of vector similarity measurement, COIN achieves high accuracy and low overhead. We implement a prototype system, and our evaluation results on both the trace-driven and real-life experiments confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our system.

Backscatter communication networks receive much attention recently due to the small size and low power of backscatter nodes. As backscatter communication is often influenced by the dynamic wireless channel quality, rate adaptation becomes necessary. Most existing approaches share a common drawback: they do not distinguish channel qualities from different nodes or sub-channels. Consequently, the transmission rate may be improperly selected, resulting in low network throughput. Through extensive experimental studies, we observe that channel diversity plays a significant role in rate selection. Therefore, there are opportunities of exploiting channel diversity for better rate adaptation, improving network throughput. In this paper, we propose a Channel-Aware Rate Adaptation framework (CARA) for backscatter communication networks. By employing a lightweight channel probing scheme, we are able to obtain fine-grained channel information that enables accurate channel estimation. We further design a novel channel selection algorithm, benefiting as many backscatter nodes as possible. On each selected channel, CARA chooses data rate with respect to the node that has the best channel condition. We implement CARA on commercial readers and the experiment results show that CARA achieves up to 4× goodput gain compared with state-of-the-art rate adaptation scheme.

The proliferation of mobile devices has enabled extensive mobile-data supported applications, e.g., exercise and activity recognition and quantification. Typically, these applications need predefined features and are only applicable to predefined activities. In this work, we address the issue of deep understanding of arbitrary activities and semantic searching of any activity over massive mobile sensing data. The challenges stem from the rich dynamics and the wide-spectrum of activities that a human being could perform. We propose a hierarchical activity representation, extract common bases of motion data in an unsupervised manner by leveraging the power of deep neural networks, and propose a universal multi-resolution representation for all activities without prior knowledge. Based on this representation, we design an innovative system Lasagna to manage and search motion data semantically. We implement a prototype system and our comprehensive evaluations show that our system can achieve highly accurate activity classification (with precision 98.9%) and search (with recall almost 100% and precision about 90%) over a diverse set of activities.

Counting the number of tags is a fundamental issue and has a wide range of applications in RFID systems. Most existing protocols, however, only apply to the scenario where a single reader counts the number of tags covered by its radio, or at most the union of tags covered by multiple readers. They are unable to achieve more complex counting objectives, i.e., counting the number of tags in a composite set expression such as (S1∪ S2) - (S3∩ S4). This type of counting has realistic significance as it provides more diversity than existing counting scenario, and can be applied in various applications. We formally introduce the RFID composite counting problem, which aims at counting the tags in an arbitrary set expression and obtain its strong lower bounds on the communication cost. We then propose a generic Composite Counting Framework (CCF) that provides estimates for any set expression with desired accuracy. The communication cost of CCF is proved to be within a small factor from the optimal. We build a prototype system for CCF using USRP software defined radio and Intel WISP computational tags. Also, extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of CCF. The experimental results show that CCF is generic, accurate and time-efficient.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology plays an important role in supply chain logistics and inventory control. In these applications, a series of scanning operations at different locations are often needed to cover the entire inventory (tags). In such continuous scanning scenario, adjacent scans inevitably read overlapping tags multiple times. Most existing methods suffer from low scanning efficiency when the overlap is small, since they do not distinguish the size of overlap which is an important factor of scanning performance. In this paper, we analytically unveil the fundamental relationship between the performance of continuous scanning and the size of overlap, deriving a critical threshold for the selection of scanning strategy. Further, we design an accurate estimator to approximate the overlap. Combining the estimate and a compact data structure, an adaptive scanning scheme is introduced to achieve low communication time. Through detailed analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms previous approach in total scanning time.

Many algorithms have been introduced to deterministically authenticate Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, while little work has been done to address scalability issue in batch authentications. Deterministic approaches verify tags one by one, and the communication overhead and time cost grow linearly with increasing size of tags. We design a fast and scalable counterfeits estimation scheme, INformative Counting (INC), which achieves sublinear authentication time and communication cost in batch verifications. The key novelty of INC builds on an FM-Sketch variant authentication synopsis that can capture key counting information using only sublinear space. With the help of this well-designed data structure, INC is able to provide authentication results with accurate estimates of the number of counterfeiting tags and genuine tags, while previous batch authentication methods merely provide 0/1 results indicating the existence of counterfeits. We conduct detailed theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to examine this design and the results show that INC significantly outperforms previous work in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Sensor networks are widely used in various domains like the intelligent transportation systems. Users issue queries to sensors and collect sensing data. Due to the low quality sensing devices or random link failures, sensor data are often noisy. In order to increase the reliability of the query results, continuous queries are often employed. In this work we focus on continuous holistic queries like Median. Existing approaches are mainly designed for non-holistic queries like Average. However, it is not trivial to answer holistic ones due to their non-decomposable property. We first propose two schemes based on the data correlation between different rounds, with one for getting the exact answers and the other one for deriving the approximate results. We then combine the two proposed schemes into a hybrid approach, which is adaptive to the data changing speed. We evaluate this design through extensive simulations. The results show that our approach significantly reduces the traffic cost compared with previous works while maintaining the same accuracy.

Over the past few years we have observed a phenomenal growth of smartphones. Smartphones are equipped with various hardware and software resources such as Bluetooth, camera and gravity sensors. If these resources are not managed appropriately, it may cause severe problems such as battery drains and system crashes. However, the specifications of resource management are usually implicit. In this paper, we investigate the problem of mining resource management specifications from off-the-shelf apps. Our key insight is that if a set of operations to a resource are frequently performed in a specific order, it must contain the specifications of how to manage the resource. We design a tool named Automatic Resource Specification Miner (ARSM), to automatically extract resource management specifications in smartphones. In our experiments, ARSM can mine tens of rules from 100 top rated Android apps within six hours. Our work is orthogonal to existing studies on diagnosing smartphone apps. With the resource management specifications discovered, ARSM can help them pinpoint more bugs in apps.

Mobile videos contain rich information which could be utilized for various applications, like criminal investigation and scene reconstruction. Today's crowd-sourced mobile video retrieval systems are built on video content comparison, and their wide adoption has been hindered by onerous computation of CV algorithms and redundant networking traffic of the video transmission. In this work, we propose to leverage Field of View(FoV) as a content-free descriptor to measure video similarity with little accuracy loss. Based on FoV, our system can filter out unmatched videos before any content analysis and video transmission, which dramatically cuts down the computation and communication cost for crowd-sourced mobile video retrieval. Moreover, we design a video segmentation algorithm and an R-Tree based indexing structure to further reduce the networking traffic for mobile clients and potentiate the efficiency for the cloud server. We implement a prototype system and evaluate it from different aspects. The results show that FoV descriptors are much smaller and significantly faster to extract and match compared to content descriptors, while the FoV based similarity measurement achieves comparable search accuracy with the content-based method. Our evaluation also shows that the proposed retrieval scheme is scalable with data size and can response in less than 100ms when the data set has tens of thousands of video segments, and the networking traffic between the client and the server is negligible.

Many cloud platforms emerge to meet urgent requirements for large-volume personal image store, sharing and search. Though most would agree that images contain rich sensitive information (e.g., People, location and event) and people's privacy concerns hinder their participation into untrusted services, today's cloud platforms provide little support for image privacy protection. Facing large-scale images from multiple users, it is extremely challenging for the cloud to maintain the index structure and schedule parallel computation without learning anything about the image content and indices. In this work, we introduce a novel system PIC: a Privacy-preserving Image search system on Cloud, which is a step towards feasible cloud services which provide secure content-based large-scale image search with fine-grained access control. Users can search on others' images if they are authorized by the image owners. Majority of the computationally intensive jobs are handled by the cloud, and a querier can now simply send the query and receive the result. Specially, to deal with massive images, we design our system suitable for distributed and parallel computation and introduce several optimizations to further expedite the search process. Our security analysis and prototype system evaluation results show that PIC successfully protects the image privacy at a low cost of computation and communication.

Crowdsensing applications require individuals toshare local and personal sensing data with others to produce valuableknowledge and services. Meanwhile, it has raised concernsespecially for location privacy. Users may wish to prevent privacyleak and publish as many non-sensitive contexts as possible.Simply suppressing sensitive contexts is vulnerable to the adversariesexploiting spatio-temporal correlations in users' behavior.In this work, we present PLP, a crowdsensing scheme whichpreserves privacy while maximizes the amount of data collectionby filtering a user's context stream. PLP leverages a conditionalrandom field to model the spatio-temporal correlations amongthe contexts, and proposes a speed-up algorithm to learn theweaknesses in the correlations. Even if the adversaries are strongenough to know the filtering system and the weaknesses, PLPcan still provably preserves privacy, with little computationalcost for online operations. PLP is evaluated and validated overtwo real-world smartphone context traces of 34 users. Theexperimental results show that PLP efficiently protects privacywithout sacrificing much utility.

To meet the demand of more intelligent automation services on smartphone, more and more applications are developed based on users' emotion and personality. It has been a consensus that a relationship exists between personal emotions and usage pattern of smartphone. Most of existing work studies this relationship by learning manually labeled samples collected from smartphone users. The manual labeling process, however, is time-consuming, labor-intensive and money-consuming. To address this issue, we propose iSelf, a system which provides a general service of automatic detection for user's emotions in cold-start conditions with smartphone. Using transfer learning technology, iSelf achieves high accuracy given only a few labeled samples. We also develop a hybrid public/personal inference engine and validation system, so as to make iSelf maintain continuous update. Through extensive experiments, the inferring accuracy is tested about 75% and can be improved increasingly through validation and update.

With the rapid development of mobile applications, there is an urgent need for highly efficient indoor localization service. Dedicated systems achieve good accuracy at the cost of deploying special hardware. Fingerprint-based methods avoid maintaining the expensive infrastructure but suffer from intensive labor for site-survey and poor robustness. In this paper, we present Per Loc, an infrastructure-free localization system which leverages rich vision features in indoor environment with high efficiency and accuracy. Per Loc makes use of binocular ranging technique to calculate the depth of a feature point and then figures out its geographical coordinates to build up reference point database, for which we design a filtering scheme to keep the database efficient in storage and search delay. During the localization stage, users simply take a photo of surroundings and feature points are extracted automatically as input for search scheme. Then a fast two-stage search scheme is proposed to find the nearest neighbors of query feature points in reference point database. Based on the perspective projection model, we inversely calculate users' geographical location in real time. We implement the proposed localization system on commercial smartphones as well as laptops and conduct extensive experiments. Per Loc achieves 1.76m of average error in office environment, and 2.2m of average error in shopping mall.

Mobile crowd sourcing (MCS) has grown to be a powerful computation paradigm to harness human power to solve real-world problems. Many commercial MCS platforms have arisen, enabling various novel applications. As crowd workers can be unreliable, a critical issue of these platforms is quality control. Many task assignment approaches have been proposed to increase the quality of crowd sourced tasks by matching workers and tasks in a bipartite graph. However, they fail to apply to MCS platforms where tasks are bound with locations. This paper considers the quality-aware online task assignment problem with location-based tasks. The goal is to optimize tasks' overall quality by assigning appropriate sets of tasks to workers in an online manner. To solve this problem, we propose a probabilistic quality measurement model and a hitchhiking model to characterize workers' behavior. Then we design a polynomial-time online assignment algorithm and prove that the proposed algorithm approximates the offline optimal solution with a competitive ratio of 10/7. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution.

Recently a number of systems have been developed to implement and improve the visual communication over screen-camera links. In this paper we study an opposite problem: how to prevent unauthorized users from videotaping a video played on a screen, such as in a theater, while do not affect the viewing experience of legitimate audiences. We propose and develop a light-weight hardware-free system, called Kaleido, that ensures these properties by taking advantage of the limited disparities between the screen-eye channel and the screen-camera channel. Kaleido does not require any extra hardware and is purely based on re-encoding the original video frame into multiple frames used for displaying. We extensively test our system Kaleido using a variety of smartphone cameras. Our experiments confirm that Kaleido preserves the high-quality screen-eye channel while reducing the secondary screen-camera channel quality significantly.

Taxi-sharing allows occupied taxis to pick up new passengers on the fly, promising to reduce waiting time for taxi riders and increase productivity for drivers. However, if not carefully designed, taxi-sharing may cause more harm than benefit - it becomes harder to strike the balance between driver's profit and passenger's quality of service (e.g. travel time, number of strangers that share a taxi, etc.). In this paper, we propose a QoS-aware taxi-sharing system design - QA-Share - by addressing two important challenges. First, QA-Share aims to maximize driver profit and user experience at the same time. Second, QA-Share continuously optimizes these two metrics by dynamically adapting its schedule as new requests arrive, without entering an oscillation state. To address these two challenges, we have formulated the optimization problem using integer linear programming, and derived the optimal solution under a small system scale. When the number of requests and taxis becomes large, we have devised a heuristic algorithm that has a much faster execution time. We have also studied how to minimize oscillations caused by schedule re-calculations by dynamically tuning the update threshold. We have evaluated our approach with real-world dataset in a Chinese city - ZhenJiang - which contains the GPS traces recorded by over 3,000 taxis during a period of three months in 2013. Our results show that the QoS and profit is increased by 38% compared to earlier schemes.

Many proximity-based mobile social networks are developed to facilitate connections between any two people, or to help a user to find people with a matched profile within a certain distance. A challenging task in these applications is to protect the privacy of the participants’ profiles and communications. In this paper, we design novel mechanisms, when given a preference-profile submitted by a user, that search persons with matching-profile in decentralized mobile social networks. Meanwhile, our mechanisms establish a secure communication channel between the initiator and matching users at the time when a matching user is found. These techniques can also be applied to conduct privacy preserving keywords based search without any secure communication channel. Our analysis shows that our mechanism is privacy-preserving (no participants’ profile and the submitted preference-profile are exposed), verifiable (both the initiator and any unmatched user cannot cheat each other to pretend to be matched), and efficient in both communication and computation. Extensive evaluations using real social network data, and actual system implementation on smart phones show that our mechanisms are significantly more efficient than existing solutions.

Network diagnosis is crucial in managing a wireless sensor network (WSN) since many network-related faults, such as node and link failures, can easily happen. Diagnosis tools usually consist of two key components, information collection and root-cause deduction, while in most cases information collection process is independent with root-cause deduction. This results in either redundant information which might pose high communication burden on WSNs, or incomplete information for root-cause inference that leads false judgments. To address the issue, we propose DID, a directional diagnosis approach, in which the diagnosis information acquirement is guided by the fault inference process. Through several rounds of incremental information probing and fault reasoning, root causes of the network abnormalities with high credibility are deduced. We employ a node tracing scheme to reconstruct the topical topology of faulty regions and build the inference model accordingly. We implement the DID approach in our forest monitoring sensor network system, GreenOrbs. Experimental results validate the scalability and effectiveness of this design.

How to shorten the time for channel waiting is critical to avoid network contention. Traditional MAC protocols with CSMA often assume that a transmission must be deferred if the channel is busy, so they focus more on the optimization of serial transmission performance. Recent advances in physical layer, however, allows a receiver to reengage onto a stronger incoming signal from an ongoing transmission or interference, and thus shows the potential of parallel transmissions. Indeed, even if the channel is busy, a node has opportunities to carry out a successful transmission. In this study, we propose opportunistic concurrency (OPC), a new MAC layer scheme, which enables sensor nodes to capture the opportunistic concurrency and carry out parallel transmissions instead of always waiting for a clear channel. Based on local concurrency map, which encodes the interactions among different links, OPC utilizes concurrency control algorithm to make transmission decision distributedly. Our experiments on a testbed consisting of 60 TelosB sensor motes identify the transmission opportunities in WSNs with OPC. Evaluation results show that OPC achieves a 17 percent reduction in packet latency, a 9.4 percent addition in throughput and a 10 percent reduction in power consumption compared with existing approaches.

Traditional approaches for wireless sensor network diagnosis are mainly sink-based. They actively collect global evidences from sensor nodes to the sink so as to conduct centralized analysis at the powerful back-end. On the one hand, long distance proactive information retrieval incurs huge transmission overhead; On the other hand, due to the coupling effect between diagnosis component and the application itself, sink often fails to obtain complete and precise evidences from the network, especially for the problematic or critical parts. To avoid large overhead in evidence collection process, self-diagnosis injects fault inference modules into sensor nodes and let them make local decisions. Diagnosis results from single nodes, however, are generally inaccurate due to the narrow scope of system performances. Besides, existing self-diagnosis methods usually lead to inconsistent results from different inference processes. How to balance the workload among the sensor nodes in a diagnosis task is a critical issue. In this work, we present a new in-network diagnosis approach named Local-Diagnosis (LD2), which conducts the diagnosis process in a local area. LD2 achieves diagnosis decision through distributed evidence fusion operations. Each sensor node provides its own judgements and the evidences are fused within a local area based on the Dempster-Shafer theory, resulting in the consensus diagnosis report. We implement LD2 on TinyOS 2.1 and examine the performance on a 50 nodes indoor testbed.

In large-scale wireless sensor networks, faulty link detection plays a critical role in network diagnosis and management. Most potential network bottlenecks such as network partition and routing errors can be detected by link scan. Since sequentially checking all potential links incurs high transmission and storage cost, we propose a passive scheme Link Scanner (LS) for monitoring wireless links. As we know, to maintain a sensor network running in a normal condition, many applications in flooding manner are necessary, such as time synchronization, reprogramming, protocol update, etc. During such regular flooding processes that for other purposes originally, LS passively collects hop counts of received probe messages at sensor nodes. Based on the observation that faulty links can result in mismatch between received hop counts and network topology, LS deduces all links' status with a probabilistic model. We evaluate our scheme by carrying out experiments on a testbed with 60 TelosB motes and conducting extensive simulation tests. A real outdoor system is also deployed to verify that LS can be reliably applied to surveillance networks.

Efficient tag identification is fundamentally required in large-scale RFID systems. Tag signal collision degrades identification efficiency as tag IDs involved in collision cannot be decoded. The situation becomes even worse in large-scale RFID systems when tag cardinality booms. Existing anti-collision protocols focus on either reducing collision probability or adopting spread spectrum techniques. Unfortunately, the former approach cannot resolve collision radically and the latter one occupies extra bandwidth resources. To address these issues, we propose to resolve tag collision using orthogonal Walsh code, in which tags map their IDs to a group of Walsh codes and transmit them sequentially. The reader can retrieve tag IDs by inverse mapping even under collision circumstances. We further design a new efficient tag identification protocol, Wonder, which reduces identification time without spreading the bandwidth. We conduct extensive simulations to examine its effectiveness and the results show that our protocol significantly improves identification efficiency over previous anti-collision protocols.

Being embedded in the physical world, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) present a wide range of failures, due to environment conditions, hardware limitations and software uncertainties, and so on. Once deployed, the interactivity of a WSN greatly decreases, which leads to limited visibility of network performance for managers to investigate sensor behaviors. Existing evidence-based approaches aim to explain particular network symptoms based on expert knowledge and heuristic experiences, which degrade diagnosis accuracy and perform unreliably. These diagnosis models define a limited group of network failures, emphasizing on expert knowledge too much, and thus fail to be adopted to different applications. In this work, we propose VN2, a novel tool to enhance the visibility of network performance. VN2 quantifies a node's state in terms of variation of 43 metrics, and trains a representative matrix of network exceptions with Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) model. With this matrix, when a new network state coming up, VN2 automatically attributes abnormal symptoms to one or more root causes. We implement VN2 on test bed and real system traces. Experimental results show that VN2 models network exceptions involving small subsets of root causes, and the interpretation of root causes help us understand network behaviors in details.

Counting the number of RFID tags is a fundamental issue and has a wide range of applications in RFID systems. Most existing protocols, however, only apply to the scenario where a single reader counts the number of tags covered by its radio, or at most the union of tags covered by multiple readers. They are unable to achieve more complex counting objectives, i.e., counting the number of tags in a composite set expression such as (S_1 big cup S_2) - (S_3 big cap S_4). This type of counting has realistic significance since it provides more diversity than existing counting scenario, and can be applied in various applications. In this paper, we formally introduce the RFID composite counting problem, which aims at counting the tags in arbitrary set expression. We obtain strong lower bounds on the communication cost of composite counting. We then propose a generic Composite Counting Framework (CCF) that provides estimates for any set expression with desired accuracy. The communication cost of CCF is proved to be within a small factor from the optimal. We build a prototype system for CCF using USRP software defined radio and Intel WISP computational tags. Also, extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of CCF. The experimental results show that CCF is generic, accurate and time-efficient.

In a large-scale wireless sensor network, thousands of sensor nodes periodically generate and forward data back to the sink. In our recent outdoor deployment, we observe that some bottleneck nodes can greatly determine other nodes' data collection ratio, and thus affect the whole network performance. To figure out the importance of a node in data collection, the manager needs to understand the interactive behaviors among the parent and child nodes. To address this issue, we present a management tool BOND (Bottleneck Node Detector). We introduce the concept of Node Dependence to characterize how much a node relies on each of its parent nodes. BOND models the routing process as a Hidden Markov Model, and uses a machine learning approach to learn the state transition probabilities in this model based on the observed traces. BOND utilizes Node Dependence to explore the hidden bottleneck nodes in the network. Moreover, we can predict how adding or removing the sensor nodes would impact the data flow, thus avoid data loss and flow congestion in redeployment. We implement our tool on real hardware and deploy it in an outdoor system. Our extensive experiments show that BOND infers the Node Dependence with an average accuracy of more than 85%.

Time synchronization plays an important role in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to the unique features of WSNs such as remote deployment, low-cost hardware, and restrictive energy supply, accurate and robust time synchronization is still a challenging task. Many approaches have been proposed to improve the performance and efficiency of time synchronization. Existing schemes, however, do not pay enough attention to the impacts of varying network topology properties, including network diameter, degree distribution, and the like. They can experience unexpected performance degradation in many real systems. To address these issues, we present a novel approach, which tries to improve the performance of existing time synchronization algorithms by introducing a virtual overlay. We propose an integrated model, called topo-refiner, which encodes the impact of different network topology features to the precision and robustness of time synchronization. Also, we design a novel optimization algorithm to build a virtual overlay from the underlying communication network. Our approach is orthogonal to existing clock synchronization methods, and can improve their performance by operating these methods atop the virtual layer. Finally, in order to verify the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive simulations on synthetic and real system traces, as well as testbed experiments. Results show that topo-refiner is practical, and quickly adapts to varying time synchronization accuracy requirements for applications in WSNs.

One important issue of RFID applications is to estimate the cardinality of large-scale RFID tags in the interested region. From a practical perspective, we require: (i) the estimate can be arbitrarily accurate, and (ii) its time cost should be scalable with the tags size, regardless of the tags distribution. Existing solutions, however, either assume the use of hash functions with ideal random properties, or impose unacceptable computation/storage overhead for tags. More importantly, those approaches only give asymptotic results and fail to provide rigorous bounds for the rate of convergence. In this paper, we propose a new scheme, Arbitrarily Accurate Approximation (A3), to reliably estimate the number of tags with any desired accuracy. In particular, for a given requirement of (ε,δ), we show that A3achieves O((log log n+ε-2) log δ-1) time efficiency. Results show that A3significantly outperforms previous designs under various distributions of tags.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology plays an important role in supply chain logistics and inventory control. In these applications, a series of scanning operations at different locations are often needed to cover the entire inventory (tags). In such continuous scanning scenario, adjacent scans inevitably read overlapping tags multiple times. Most existing methods suffer from low scanning efficiency when the overlap is small, since they do not distinguish the size of overlap which is an important factor of scanning performance. In this paper, we analytically unveil the fundamental relationship between the performance of continuous scanning and the size of overlap, deriving a critical threshold for the selection of scanning strategy. Further, we design an accurate estimator to approximate the overlap. Combining the estimate and a compact data structure, an adaptive scanning scheme is introduced to achieve low communication time. Through detailed analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms previous approach in total scanning time.

In this work we design and develop Montage for real-time multi-user formation tracking and localization by off-the-shelf smartphones. Montage achieves submeter-level tracking accuracy by integrating temporal and spatial constraints from user movement vector estimation and distance measuring. In Montage we designed a suite of novel techniques to surmount a variety of challenges in real-time tracking, without infrastructure and fingerprints, and without any a priori user-specific (e.g., stride-length and phone-placement) or site-specific (e.g., digitalized map) knowledge. We implemented, deployed and evaluated Montage in both outdoor and indoor environment. Our experimental results (847 traces from 15 users) show that the stride-length estimated by Montage over all users has error within 9cm, and the moving-direction estimated by Montage is within 20o. For realtime tracking, Montage provides meter-second-level formation tracking accuracy with off-the-shelf mobile phones.

In this work, we explore a new networking mechanism with smart glasses, through which users can express their interest and connect to a target simply by a gaze. Doing this, we attempt to let wearable devices understand human attention and intention, and pair devices carried by users according to such attention and intention. To achieve this ambitious goal, we propose a proof-of-concept system iGaze, a visual attention driven networking suite: an iGaze glass (hardware), and a networking protocol VAN (software). Our glass, iGaze glass, is a low-cost head-mounted glass with a camera, orientation sensors, microphone and speakers, which are embedded with our software for visual attention capture and networking. A visual attention driven networking protocol (VAN) is carefully designed and implemented. In VAN, we design an energy efficient and highly accurate visual attention determination scheme using single camera to capture user's communication interest and a double-matching scheme based on visual direction detection and Doppler effect of acoustic signal to lock the target devices. Using our system, we conduct a series of trials for various application scenarios to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.

In this demo, we propose a proof-of-concept networking system for smart glasses, through which users can express their interest and connect to a target simply by a gaze. Our system iGaze is a visual attention driven networking suite: an iGaze glass (hardware) and a networking protocol VAN (software). Our glass is a low-cost head-mounted glass with a camera, orientation sensors, microphone and speakers, which are embedded with our software for visual attention capture and networking. A visual attention driven networking protocol (VAN) is carefully designed and implemented. In VAN, we design an energy efficient and highly accurate visual attention determination scheme using single camera to capture user's communication interest and a double-matching scheme based on visual direction detection and Doppler effect of acoustic signal to lock the target devices. iGaze has separated and modularized hardware and software design. It can run on top of existing networking protocols, e.g., Wi-Fi.

In this study, we explore the possibility of locating remote objects via cameras together with built-in inertial sensors of off-the-shelf smartphones. Our solution, CamLoc, enables a user taking two photos of an object using a smartphone at a fixed location and immediately knowing the location of the object in global coordinates, thus facilitating myriad location-based services. Such usage is user-friendly but error prone. We devise several techniques to mitigate the errors caused by cheap and noisy sensors, upgrading the positioning accuracy to an applicable level. We prototype CamLoc on Android OS, and evaluate its performance across different scenarios with various building densities. Experiment results show that our system achieves 89 percent and 72 percent physical location mapping accuracy in rural and downtown areas, respectively, which is competitive with existing solutions.

Existing approaches to diagnosing sensor networks are generally sink based, which rely on actively pulling state information from sensor nodes so as to conduct centralized analysis. First, sink-based tools incur huge communication overhead to the traffic-sensitive sensor networks. Second, due to the unreliable wireless communications, sink often obtains incomplete and suspicious information, leading to inaccurate judgments. Even worse, it is always more difficult to obtain state information from problematic or critical regions. To address the given issues, we present a novel self-diagnosis approach, which encourages each single sensor to join the fault decision process. We design a series of fault detectors through which multiple nodes can cooperate with each other in a diagnosis task. Fault detectors encode the diagnosis process to state transitions. Each sensor can participate in the diagnosis by transiting the detector's current state to a new state based on local evidences and then passing the detector to other nodes. Having sufficient evidences, the fault detector achieves the Accept state and outputs a final diagnosis report. We examine the performance of our self-diagnosis tool called TinyD2 on a 100-node indoor testbed and conduct field studies in the GreenOrbs system, which is an operational sensor network with 330 nodes outdoor.

In large-scale wireless sensor networks, it proves very difficult to dynamically monitor system degradation and detect bad links. Faulty link detection plays a critical role in network diagnosis. Indeed, a destructive node impacts its links' performances including transmitting and receiving. Similarly, other potential network bottlenecks such as network partition and routing errors can be detected by link scan. Since sequentially checking all potential links incurs high transmission and storage cost, existing approaches often focus on links currently in use, while overlook those unused yet ones, thus fail to offer more insights to guide following operations. We propose a novel scheme Link Scanner (LS) for monitoring wireless links at real time. LS issues one probe message in the network and collects hop counts of the received probe messages at sensor nodes. Based on the observation that faulty links can result in mismatch between the received hop counts and the network topology, we are able to deduce all links' status with a probabilistic model. We evaluate our scheme by carrying out experiments on a testbed with 60 TelosB motes and conducting extensive simulation tests. A real outdoor system is also deployed to verify that LS can be reliably applied to surveillance networks.

The deployment of large scale Wireless Sensor Networks generally needs network management and measurement solutions. End-to-end delay is one of the most important metrics in assessing the network performance. Many efforts have been devoted to measuring the end-to-end delay efficiently and precisely. Unfortunately, existing approaches often require sensor nodes to be tightly time synchronized which is costly in resource limited sensor network. We propose a novel scheme that can measure the end-to-end delay for each packet to the granularity of tens of microseconds without clock synchronization. Through extensive experiments on our testbed, we examine the effectiveness of our approach. The results show that our scheme achieves high performance with low overhead. We also present observations about the network states by tracking and analyzing the end-to-end delay data.

Many algorithms have been introduced to deterministically authenticate Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, while little work has been done to address the scalability issue in batch authentications. Deterministic approaches verify them one by one, and the communication overhead and time cost grow linearly with increasing size of tags. We design a fine-grained batch authentication scheme, INformative Counting (INC), which achieves sublinear authentication time and communication cost in batch verifications. INC also provides authentication results with accurate estimates of the number of counterfeiting tags and genuine tags, while previous batch authentication methods merely provide 0/1 results indicating the existence of counterfeits. We conduct detailed theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to examine this design and the results show that INC significantly outperforms previous work in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Driven by rising application demands, the scale of Wireless Sensor Networks has grow rapidly in recent years. Thus, the traditional network management pattern, in which the sink is responsible for managing the entire network, reveals many problems in terms of both performance and efficiency. We propose an energy-efficient scheme to improve the performance of online network management and diagnosis services based on the quality of interactive communications in large-scale sensor networks. By abstracting the uncertain network model from our deployed sensor systems, we define the manageable nodes. Under different practical constraints, we then design algorithms in which multiple management centers can work in cooperation to cover as many manageable nodes as many as possible. Using the data obtained from our urban sensing sensor network system, CitySee with 494 nodes, we conduct trace-driven simulations. The experimental results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of this design.

Sensor networks are deemed suitable for large-scale deployments in the wild for a variety of applications. In spite of the remarkable efforts the community put to build the sensor systems, an essential question still remains unclear at the system level, motivating us to explore the answer from a point of real-world deployment view. Does the wireless sensor network really scale? We present findings from a large-scale operating sensor network system, GreenOrbs, with up to 330 nodes deployed in the forest. We instrument such an operating network throughout the protocol stack and present observations across layers in the network. Based on our findings from the system measurement, we propose and make initial efforts to validate three conjectures that give potential guidelines for future designs of large-scale sensor networks. 1) A small portion of nodes bottlenecks the entire network, and most of the existing network indicators may not accurately capture them. 2) The network dynamics mainly come from the inherent concurrency of network operations instead of environment changes. 3) The environment, although the dynamics are not as significant as we assumed, has an unpredictable impact on the sensor network. We suggest that an event-based routing structure can be trained and thus better adapted to the wild environment when building a large-scale sensor network.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), diagnosis is a crucial and challenging task due to the distributed nature and stringent resources. Most previous approaches are supervised, relying on a-priori knowledge of network faults. Our experience with GreenOrbs, a long-term large-scale WSN system, reveals the need of diagnosis in an agnostic manner. Specifically, in addition to predefined faults (i.e., with known types and symptoms), silent failures that are unknown beforehand, account for a large fraction of network performance degradation. Currently, there is no effective solution for silent failures because they are often diverse and highly system-related. In this paper, we propose Agnostic Diagnosis (AD), an online lightweight failure detection approach. AD is motivated by the fact that the system metrics (e.g., radio-on time, number of packets transmitted) of sensor nodes usually exhibit certain correlation patterns. Violations of such patterns indicate potential silent failures. We implement AD on a working WSN consisting of 330 nodes. Our experimental results demonstrate the advantages of AD to discover silent failures, effectively expanding the capacity and scope of WSN diagnosis.

Traditional approaches for wireless sensor network diagnosis are mainly sink-based. They actively collect global evidences from sensor nodes to the sink so as to conduct centralized analysis at the powerful back-end. On the one hand, long distance proactive information retrieval incurs huge transmission overhead; On the other hand, due to the coupling effect between diagnosis component and the application itself, sink often fails to obtain complete and precise evidences from the network, especially for the problematic or critical parts. To avoid large overhead in evidence collection process, self-diagnosis injects fault inference modules into sensor nodes and let them make local decisions. Diagnosis results from single nodes, however, are generally inaccurate due to the narrow scope of system performances. Besides, existing self-diagnosis methods usually lead to inconsistent results from different inference processes. How to balance the workload among the sensor nodes in a diagnosis task is a critical issue. In this work, we present a new in-network diagnosis approach named Local-Diagnosis (LD2), which conducts the diagnosis process in a local area. LD2 achieves diagnosis decision through distributed evidence fusion operations. Each sensor node provides its own judgements and the evidences are fused within a local area based on the Dempster-Shafer theory, resulting in the consensus diagnosis report. We implement LD2 on TinyOS 2.1 and examine the performance on a 50 nodes indoor testbed.

Coverage problem is a fundamental issue in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Previous techniques for coverage scheduling often require accurate location information or range measurements, which cannot be easily obtained in resource-limited ad hoc and sensor networks. Recently, a method based on algebraic topology is proposed to achieve coverage verification using only connectivity information. The topological method sheds some light on the issue of location-free coverage. Unfortunately, the needs of centralized computation and rigorous restriction on sensing and communication ranges greatly limit the applicability in practical large-scale distributed sensor networks. In this work, we make the first attempt toward establishing a graph theoretical framework for connectivity-based coverage with configurable coverage granularity. We propose a novel coverage criterion and scheduling method based on cycle partition. Our method is able to construct a sparse coverage set in a distributed manner, using purely connectivity information. Compared with existing methods, our design has a particular advantage, which permits us to configure or adjust the quality of coverage by adequately exploiting diverse sensing ranges and specific requirements of different applications. We formally prove the correctness and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive simulations and comparisons with the state-of-the-art approaches.

In spite of the remarkable efforts the community put to build the sensor systems, an essential question still remains unclear at the system level, motivating us to explore the answer from a point of real-world deployment view. Does the wireless sensor network really scale? We present findings from a large scale operating sensor network system, GreenOrbs, with up to 330 nodes deployed in the forest. We instrument such an operating network throughout the protocol stack and present observations across layers in the network. Based on our findings from the system measurement, we propose and make initial efforts to validate three conjectures that give potential guidelines for future designs of large scale sensor networks. (1) A small portion of nodes bottlenecks the entire network, and most of the existing network indicators may not accurately capture them. (2) The network dynamics mainly come from the inherent concurrency of network operations instead of environment changes. (3) The environment, although the dynamics are not as significant as we assumed, has an unpredictable impact on the sensor network. We suggest that an event-based routing structure can be trained optimal and thus better adapt to the wild environment when building a large scale sensor network.

Existing approaches to diagnosing sensor networks are generally sink-based, which rely on actively pulling state information from all sensor nodes so as to conduct centralized analysis. However, the sink-based diagnosis tools incur huge communication overhead to the traffic sensitive sensor networks. Also, due to the unreliable wireless communications, sink often obtains incomplete and sometimes suspicious information, leading to highly inaccurate judgments. Even worse, we observe that it is always more difficult to obtain state information from the problematic or critical regions. To address the above issues, we present the concept of self-diagnosis, which encourages each single sensor to join the fault decision process. We design a series of novel fault detectors through which multiple nodes can cooperate with each other in a diagnosis task. The fault detectors encode the diagnosis process to state transitions. Each sensor can participate in the fault diagnosis by transiting the detector's current state to a new one based on local evidences and then pass the fault detector to other nodes. Having sufficient evidences, the fault detector achieves the Accept state and outputs the final diagnosis report. We examine the performance of our self-diagnosis tool called TinyD2 on a 100 nodes testbed.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), diagnosis is a crucial and challenging task due to the distributed nature and stringent resources. Most previous approaches are supervised, relying on a-priori knowledge of network faults. On the other hand, our experience with GreenOrbs, a long-term large-scale WSN system, reveals the need of diagnosis in an agnostic manner. Specifically, in addition to predefined faults (i.e., with known types and symptoms), silent failures that are unknown beforehand, account for a large fraction of network performance degradation. Currently, there is no effective solution for silent failures because they are often diverse and highly system-related. In this paper, we propose Agnostic Diagnosis (AD), an online lightweight failure detection approach. AD is motivated by the fact that the system metrics (e.g., radio-on time, number of packets transmitted) of GreenOrbs sensors usually exhibit certain correlation patterns. Violations of such patterns indicate potential silent failures. We accordingly design a correlation graph, which systematically characterizes internal correlations inside a node. Silent failures are discovered by tracking the changes and anomalies of correlation graphs. We implement AD on a working WSN consisting of 330 nodes. Our experimental results demonstrate the advantages of AD to discover silent failures, effectively expanding the capacity and scope of WSN diagnosis.

Many efforts have been made for addressing coverage problems in sensor networks. They fall into two categories, full coverage and barrier coverage, featured as static coverage. In this work, we study a new coverage scenario, sweep coverage, which differs with the previous static coverage. In sweep coverage, we only need to monitor certain points of interest (POIs) periodically so the coverage at each POI is time-variant, and thus we are able to utilize a small number of mobile sensors to achieve sweep coverage among a much larger number of POIs. We investigate the definitions and model for sweep coverage. Given a set of POIs and their sweep period requirements, we prove that determining the minimum number of required sensors (min-sensor sweep-coverage problem) is NP-hard, and it cannot be approximated within a factor of 2. We propose a centralized algorithm with constant approximation ratio 3 for the min-sensor sweep-coverage problem. We further characterize the nonlocality of the problem and design a distributed sweep algorithm, DSWEEP, cooperating sensors to provide efficiency with the best effort. We conduct extensive simulations to study the performance of the proposed algorithms. Our simulations show that DSWEEP outperforms the randomized scheme in both effectiveness and efficiency.

Coverage problem is a fundamental issue in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. Previous techniques for coverage scheduling often require accurate location information or range measurements, which cannot be easily obtained in resource-limited ad hoc and sensor networks. Recently, a method based on algebraic topology has been proposed to achieve coverage verification using only connectivity information. The topological method sheds some light on the issue of location-free coverage. Unfortunately, the needs of centralized computation and rigorous restriction on sensing and communication ranges greatly limit the applicability in practical large-scale distributed sensor networks. In this work, we make the first attempt towards establishing a graph theoretical framework for connectivity-based coverage with configurable coverage granularity. We propose a novel coverage criterion and scheduling method based on cycle partition. Our method is able to construct a sparse coverage set in a distributed manner, using purely connectivity information. Compared with existing methods, our design has a particular advantage, which permits us to configure or adjust the quality of coverage by adequately exploiting diverse sensing ranges and specific requirements of different applications. We formally prove the correctness and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive simulations and comparisons with the state-of-the-art approaches.

The high mobility of VANET makes information exchange across the network excessively difficult. Traditional approaches designed for stationary networks are not applicable due to the high dynamics among the nodes. Applying the routing techniques tailored for general mobile networks inevitably brings huge traffic burden to the crowded urban VANET and leads to low efficiency. To make the information exchange fluent and efficient, we explore the unique features of the urban VANET. By exploring the invariants in the mobile network topology, we are able to efficiently manage the information on top of the “intersection graph” transformed from the underlying network of road segments in the urban area. Our approach can thus achieve efficient query dissemination and data retrieval on this information organization. We intensively investigate and analyze a trace that records the movement of more than 4000 taxies in the urban area of Shanghai City over several months. We grasp the key impact of the fundamental factors that affect the VANET behaviors and accordingly develop tailored techniques to maximize the performance of this design. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our design.

Network diagnosis, an essential research topic for traditional networking systems, has not received much attention for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Existing sensor debugging tools like sympathy or EmStar rely heavily on an add-in protocol that generates and reports a large amount of status information from individual sensor nodes, introducing network overhead to the resource constrained and usually traffic-sensitive sensor network. We report our initial attempt at providing a lightweight network diagnosis mechanism for sensor networks. We further propose PAD, a probabilistic diagnosis approach for inferring the root causes of abnormal phenomena. PAD employs a packet marking scheme for efficiently constructing and dynamically maintaining the inference model. Our approach does not incur additional traffic overhead for collecting desired information. Instead, we introduce a probabilistic inference model that encodes internal dependencies among different network elements for online diagnosis of an operational sensor network system. Such a model is capable of additively reasoning root causes based on passively observed symptoms. We implement the PAD prototype in our sea monitoring sensor network test-bed. We also examine the efficiency and scalability of this design through extensive trace-driven simulations.

Many efforts have been made for addressing coverage problems in sensor networks. They fall into two categories, full coverage and barrier coverage, featured as static coverage. In this work, we study a new coverage scenario, sweep coverage, which differs with the previous static coverage. In sweep coverage, we only need to monitor certain points of interest (POIs) periodically so the coverage at each POI is time-variant, and thus we are able to utilize a small number of mobile sensors to achieve sweep coverage among a much larger number of POIs. We investigate the definitions and model for sweep coverage. Given a set of POIs and their sweep period requirements, we prove that determining the minimum number of required sensors (min-sensor sweep-coverage problem) is NP-hard, and it cannot be approximated within a factor of 2. We propose a centralized algorithm with constant approximation ratio 2 + epsi for the simplified problem where all sweep periods are identical. We further characterize the non-locality of the problem and design a distributed sweep algorithm, DSWEEP, cooperating sensors to provide required sweep requirements with the best effort. We conduct extensive simulations to study the performance of the proposed algorithms. Our simulations show that DSWEEP outperforms the randomized scheme in both effectiveness and efficiency.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used for various monitoring applications. Users issue queries to sensors and collect sensing data. Due to the low quality sensing devices or random link failures, sensor data are often noisy. In order to increase the reliability of the query results, continuous queries are often employed. In this work we focus on continuous holistic queries like median. Existing approaches are mainly designed for non-holistic queries like average. However, it is not trivial to answer holistic ones due to their non-decomposable property. We propose two schemes for answering queries under different data changing conditions. While sensor data changes slowly, based on the data correlation between different rounds, we propose one algorithm for getting the exact answers. When the data changing speed is high, we propose another approach to derive the approximate results. We evaluate both designs through extensive simulations. The results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the traffic cost compared with previous works while maintaining the same accuracy.

Network diagnosis, an essential research topic for traditional networking systems, has not received much attention for wireless sensor networks. Existing sensor debugging tools like sympathy or EmStar rely heavily on an add-in protocol that generates and reports a large amount of status information from individual sen-sor nodes, introducing network overhead to a resource constrained and usually traffic sensitive sensor network. We report in this study our initial attempt at providing a light-weight network diag-nosis mechanism for sensor networks. We propose PAD, a prob-abilistic diagnosis approach for inferring the root causes of ab-normal phenomena. PAD employs a packet marking algorithm for efficiently constructing and dynamically maintaining the inference model. Our approach does not incur additional traffic overhead for collecting desired information. Instead, we introduce a prob-abilistic inference model which encodes internal dependencies among different network elements, for online diagnosis of an operational sensor network system. Such a model is capable of additively reasoning root causes based on passively observed symptoms. We implement the PAD design in our sea monitoring sensor network test-bed and validate its effectiveness. We further evaluate the efficiency and scalability of this design through ex-tensive trace-driven simulations.

No abstract available.