eDiscovery: Energy efficient device discovery for mobile opportunistic communications

In this paper, we propose an energy efficient device discovery protocol, eDiscovery, as the first step to bootstrapping opportunistic communications for smartphones, the most popular mobile devices. We chose Bluetooth over WiFi as the underlying wireless technology of device discovery, based on our measurement study of their energy consumption on smartphones. eDiscovery adaptively changes the duration and interval of Bluetooth inquiry in dynamic environments, by leveraging history information of discovered peers. We implement a prototype of eDiscovery on Nokia N900 smartphones and evaluate its performance in three different environments. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to conduct extensive performance evaluation of Bluetooth device discovery in the wild. Our experimental results demonstrate that compared with a scheme with constant inquiry duration and interval, eDiscovery can save around 44% energy at the expense of discovering only about 21% less peers. The results also show that eDiscovery performs better than other existing schemes, by discovering more peers and consuming less energy.

[1]  David E. Culler,et al.  Practical asynchronous neighbor discovery and rendezvous for mobile sensing applications , 2008, SenSys '08.

[2]  Andrzej Duda,et al.  Adaptive energy conserving algorithms for neighbor discovery in opportunistic Bluetooth networks , 2007, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[3]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  Clearing the RF smog: making 802.11n robust to cross-technology interference , 2011, SIGCOMM.

[4]  Timo Ojala,et al.  Bluetooth and WAP push based location-aware mobile advertising system , 2004, MobiSys '04.

[5]  Ellen W. Zegura,et al.  A message ferrying approach for data delivery in sparse mobile ad hoc networks , 2004, MobiHoc '04.

[6]  Roy Friedman,et al.  On Power and Throughput Tradeoffs of WiFi and Bluetooth in Smartphones , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[7]  Marco Conti,et al.  From opportunistic networks to opportunistic computing , 2010, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[8]  Alec Wolman,et al.  BlueMonarch: a system for evaluating bluetooth applications in the wild , 2009, MobiSys '09.

[9]  Kevin C. Almeroth,et al.  Coupons: A Multilevel Incentive Scheme for Information Dissemination in Mobile Networks , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[10]  Steven A. Borbash,et al.  Birthday protocols for low energy deployment and flexible neighbor discovery in ad hoc wireless networks , 2001, MobiHoc '01.

[11]  Brian S. Peterson,et al.  Bluetooth Inquiry Time Characterization and Selection , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[12]  Donald F. Towsley,et al.  Neighbor discovery in wireless networks and the coupon collector's problem , 2009, MobiCom '09.

[13]  Aravind Srinivasan,et al.  Mobile Data Offloading through Opportunistic Communications and Social Participation , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[14]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  Traps and pitfalls of using contact traces in performance studies of opportunistic networks , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[15]  Liam McNamara,et al.  Media sharing based on colocation prediction in urban transport , 2008, MobiCom '08.

[16]  Sagar Naik,et al.  Analysis of the Bluetooth device discovery protocol , 2010, Wirel. Networks.

[17]  Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer,et al.  Cool-Tether: energy efficient on-the-fly wifi hot-spots using mobile phones , 2009, CoNEXT '09.

[18]  David Tse,et al.  Mobility increases the capacity of ad-hoc wireless networks , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[19]  Karthik Lakshmanan,et al.  U-connect: a low-latency energy-efficient asynchronous neighbor discovery protocol , 2010, IPSN '10.

[20]  Bi Wu,et al.  CrowdLab: An architecture for volunteer mobile testbeds , 2011, 2011 Third International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2011).

[21]  Rajesh K. Gupta,et al.  CoolSpots: reducing the power consumption of wireless mobile devices with multiple radio interfaces , 2006, MobiSys '06.

[22]  Leandros Tassiulas,et al.  Proximity awareness and fast connection establishment in Bluetooth , 2000, 2000 First Annual Workshop on Mobile and Ad Hoc Networking and Computing. MobiHOC (Cat. No.00EX444).

[23]  David A. Maltz,et al.  Dynamic Source Routing in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks , 1994, Mobidata.

[24]  Chadi Barakat,et al.  Maximizing transfer opportunities in bluetooth DTNs , 2006, CoNEXT '06.

[25]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  Clearing the RF smog: making 802.11n robust to cross-technology interference , 2011, SIGCOMM.

[26]  Wei Wang,et al.  Adaptive contact probing mechanisms for delay tolerant applications , 2007, MobiCom '07.

[27]  Sanjay Shakkottai,et al.  FlashLinQ: A synchronous distributed scheduler for peer-to-peer ad hoc networks , 2010, 2010 48th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton).