Dissemination and Harvesting of Urban Data Using Vehicular Sensing Platforms

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

[1]  Liviu Iftode,et al.  VITP: an information transfer protocol for vehicular computing , 2005, VANET '05.

[2]  Haiyun Luo,et al.  Statistical en-route filtering of injected false data in sensor networks , 2005, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[3]  David R. Karger,et al.  A scalable location service for geographic ad hoc routing , 2000, MobiCom '00.

[4]  Jing Zhao,et al.  VADD: Vehicle-Assisted Data Delivery in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks , 2008, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol..

[5]  Raja Sengupta,et al.  Vehicle-to-vehicle safety messaging in DSRC , 2004, VANET '04.

[6]  Waylon Brunette,et al.  Data MULEs: modeling and analysis of a three-tier architecture for sparse sensor networks , 2003, Ad Hoc Networks.

[7]  Cristian Borcea,et al.  The Urbanet Revolution: Sensor Power to the People! , 2007, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[8]  Ahmed Helmy,et al.  Impact of Mobility on Mobility Assisted Information Diffusion ( MAID ) Protocols , 2005 .

[9]  Hao Wu,et al.  MDDV: a mobility-centric data dissemination algorithm for vehicular networks , 2004, VANET '04.

[10]  Zygmunt J. Haas,et al.  The shared wireless infostation model: a new ad hoc networking paradigm (or where there is a whale, there is a way) , 2003, MobiHoc '03.

[11]  Sushil Jajodia,et al.  An interleaved hop-by-hop authentication scheme for filtering of injected false data in sensor networks , 2004, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2004. Proceedings. 2004.

[12]  Kaixin Xu,et al.  Group and swarm mobility models for ad hoc network scenarios using virtual tracks , 2004, IEEE MILCOM 2004. Military Communications Conference, 2004..

[13]  Yih-Chun Hu,et al.  Ariadne: A Secure On-Demand Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks , 2005, Wirel. Networks.

[14]  Martin Vetterli,et al.  Locating Nodes with EASE: Mobility Diffusion of Last Encounters in Ad Hoc Networks , 2003, INFOCOM.

[15]  Jessica Staddon,et al.  Detecting and correcting malicious data in VANETs , 2004, VANET '04.

[16]  Brian Gallagher,et al.  MaxProp: Routing for Vehicle-Based Disruption-Tolerant Networks , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[17]  David A. Maltz,et al.  A performance comparison of multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols , 1998, MobiCom '98.

[18]  Hannes Hartenstein,et al.  Broadcast reception rates and effects of priority access in 802.11-based vehicular ad-hoc networks , 2004, VANET '04.

[19]  Theodore S. Rappaport,et al.  Wireless communications - principles and practice , 1996 .

[20]  Cauligi S. Raghavendra,et al.  Performance analysis of mobility-assisted routing , 2006, MobiHoc '06.

[21]  Yong Wang,et al.  Energy-efficient computing for wildlife tracking: design tradeoffs and early experiences with ZebraNet , 2002, ASPLOS X.

[22]  Waylon Brunette,et al.  Data MULEs: modeling a three-tier architecture for sparse sensor networks , 2003, Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Network Protocols and Applications, 2003..

[23]  Mark H. Hansen,et al.  Participatory sensing - eScholarship , 2006 .

[24]  Davide Frey,et al.  Towards lightweight information dissemination in inter-vehicular networks , 2006, VANET '06.

[25]  Ahmed Helmy,et al.  Correlation analysis for alleviating effects of inserted data in wireless sensor networks , 2005, The Second Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services.

[26]  Martin Mauve,et al.  Decentralized discovery of free parking places , 2006, VANET '06.

[27]  Paolo Bellavista,et al.  Efficient data harvesting in mobile sensor platforms , 2006, Fourth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOMW'06).

[28]  Emiliano Miluzzo,et al.  MetroSense Project: People-Centric Sensing at Scale , 2006 .

[29]  Paolo Bellavista,et al.  Standard Integration of Sensing and Opportunistic Diffusion for Urban Monitoring in Vehicular Sensor Networks: the MobEyes Architecture , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics.

[30]  Serge J. Belongie,et al.  Recognizing Cars , 2005 .

[31]  Hongyi Wu,et al.  DFT-MSN: The Delay/Fault-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Network for Pervasive Information Gathering , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[32]  Amit Kumar Saha,et al.  Modeling mobility for vehicular ad-hoc networks , 2004, VANET '04.

[33]  Li Fan,et al.  Summary cache: a scalable wide-area web cache sharing protocol , 2000, TNET.

[34]  Tracy Camp,et al.  A survey of mobility models for ad hoc network research , 2002, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[35]  Jörg Ott,et al.  A disconnection-tolerant transport for drive-thru Internet environments , 2005, Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies..

[36]  Amin Vahdat,et al.  Efficient Peer-to-Peer Keyword Searching , 2003, Middleware.

[37]  Andrei Broder,et al.  Network Applications of Bloom Filters: A Survey , 2004, Internet Math..

[38]  Yu-Chee Tseng,et al.  The Broadcast Storm Problem in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network , 1999, Wirel. Networks.

[39]  Yang Zhang,et al.  CarTel: a distributed mobile sensor computing system , 2006, SenSys '06.

[40]  Mario Gerla,et al.  AdTorrent: Delivering Location Cognizant Advertisements to Car Networks , 2005 .

[41]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  IrisNet: An Architecture for a Worldwide Sensor Web , 2003, IEEE Pervasive Comput..

[42]  Paolo Santi,et al.  The Node Distribution of the Random Waypoint Mobility Model for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks , 2003, IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput..

[43]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Directed diffusion: a scalable and robust communication paradigm for sensor networks , 2000, MobiCom '00.

[44]  Qun Li,et al.  Sending messages to mobile users in disconnected ad-hoc wireless networks , 2000, MobiCom '00.

[45]  Paolo Bellavista,et al.  Mobeyes: smart mobs for urban monitoring with a vehicular sensor network , 2006, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[46]  Eylem Ekici,et al.  Urban multi-hop broadcast protocol for inter-vehicle communication systems , 2004, VANET '04.

[47]  W. Enkelmann.  FleetNet - applications for inter-vehicle communication , 2003, IEEE IV2003 Intelligent Vehicles Symposium. Proceedings (Cat. No.03TH8683).

[48]  H. T. Kung,et al.  Ad hoc relay wireless networks over moving vehicles on highways , 2001, MobiHoc '01.

[49]  Giovanni Pau,et al.  Co-operative downloading in vehicular ad-hoc wireless networks , 2005, Second Annual Conference on Wireless On-demand Network Systems and Services.

[50]  Burton H. Bloom,et al.  Space/time trade-offs in hash coding with allowable errors , 1970, CACM.

[51]  Maxim Raya,et al.  The security of vehicular ad hoc networks , 2005, SASN '05.

[52]  Thierry Ernst,et al.  Network mobility from the InternetCAR perspective , 2003, 17th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, 2003. AINA 2003..

[53]  Martin Vetterli,et al.  Locating nodes with EASE: last encounter routing in ad hoc networks through mobility diffusion , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[54]  Mario Gerla,et al.  FleaNet: A Virtual Market Place on Vehicular Networks , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

[55]  Jeffrey Considine,et al.  Informed content delivery across adaptive overlay networks , 2002, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[56]  Jie Liu,et al.  Challenges in Building a Portal for Sensors World-Wide , 2006 .

[57]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  MobiSense — mobile network services for coordinated participatory sensing , 2009, 2009 International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems.

[58]  Rafail Ostrovsky,et al.  Private Searching on Streaming Data , 2005, CRYPTO.