The growth of smart communities has expanded the use of IoT as a critical element in the urban planning toolkit by city officials whose goal is to improve the quality of life for citizens. Smart applications such as air-pollution monitoring, intelligent transportation, and smart buildings pose diverse information needs from the underlying sensing, communication, and computation infrastructure. In this article, we propose SmartParcels, a framework that exploits the service needs of communities to generate a comprehensive and cost-effective plan for instrumenting designated regions (often called parcels). SmartParcels embeds a cross-layer approach incorporating information/data, infrastructure, and geospatial layout as interdependent layers. We explore a suite of algorithms (optimal, partial optimal, heuristic) that can be composed in a plug-and-play manner to achieve performance-cost tradeoffs. SmartParcels can be utilized for clean-slate planning (from scratch) or retrofitting communities with existing smart infrastructure. SmartParcels allows planners to explore the possible impact of unexpected events to improve infrastructure resilience with what-if analyzers. Two real-world settings at Hsinchu, Taiwan, and Irvine, California, are leveraged in the evaluation, which reveals that SmartParcels enables a 2×–7× improvement in cost/performance metrics compared to baseline algorithms and achieves a 57% higher communication throughput while dealing with unexpected events.

Online social networks have become the medium for efficient viral marketing exploiting social influence in information diffusion. However, the emerging application Social Coupon (SC) incorporating social referral into coupons cannot be efficiently solved by previous researches which do not take into account the effect of SC allocation. The number of allocated SCs restricts the number of influenced friends for each user. In the paper, we investigate not only the seed selection problem but also the effect of SC allocation for optimizing the redemption rate which represents the efficiency of SC allocation. Accordingly, we formulate a problem named Seed Selection and SC allocation for Redemption Maximization (S3CRM) and prove the hardness of S3CRM. We design an effective algorithm with a performance guarantee, called Seed Selection and Social Coupon allocation algorithm. For S3CRM, we introduce the notion of marginal redemption to evaluate the efficiency of investment in seeds and SCs. Moreover, for a balanced investment, we develop a new graph structure called guaranteed path, to explore the opportunity to optimize the redemption rate. Finally, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on our proposed algorithm with various baselines. The results validate our ideas and show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm over baselines.

Traditional IEEE 802.11 network is designed for the use of small scale local wireless networks. However, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the scene of wireless communications. Thus, recently, the IEEE task group ah (TGah) has been dedicated to the standardization of a new protocol, called IEEE 802.11ah, which is customized for this type of large-scale networks. IEEE 802.11ah adopts a grouping-based MAC protocol to reduce the contention overhead for each group of devices. However, most existing designs simply randomly partition devices into groups, and less attention has been paid to the problem of forming efficient groups. Therefore, in this paper, we argue that the performance of grouping is closely related to heterogeneity in traffic demands of devices, and propose a traffic-aware grouping algorithm to improve channel utilization. Since channel utilization of a group closely depends on the collision probability, we further derive a regression-based analytical model to estimate the contention success probability with consideration of sensors' heterogeneous traffic demands. The evaluation via NS-3 simulations shows that the proposed regression-based model is quite accurate even when clients have diverse traffic demands, and our traffic-aware grouping outperforms other baseline approaches, especially when the network is nearly saturated.

The traditional IEEE 802.11 network is designed for the use of small scale local wireless networks such as home or campus WLANs, where one access point serves a reasonably few number of devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and so on. However, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) have changed the scene of wireless communications, while the number of devices rapidly increases and becomes far larger than before. Thus, recently, the IEEE task group ah (TGah) is dedicated to the standardization of a new protocol, called IEEE 802.11ah, which is customized for this type of large-scale networks. IEEE 802.11ah adopts the grouping-based MAC protocol to reduce the contention overhead of each group of devices. However, most existing designs simply randomly assign devices to groups, and less attention has been paid to the problem of forming efficient groups. Therefore, in this paper, we argue that the performance of grouping is closely related to the heterogeneous traffic demands of devices, and propose a load-balanced grouping algorithm to improve channel utilization of each group. Our evaluation shows that the proposed load-balanced grouping outperforms simple random grouping, especially when the network is almost saturated.