Opportunistic Network Algorithms for Internet Traffic Offloading in Music Festival Scenarios

Constant Internet connectivity has become a necessity in our lives. Hence, music festival organizers allocate part of their budget for temporary Wi-Fi equipment in order to sustain the high network traffic generated in such a small geographical area, but this naturally leads to high costs that need to be decreased. Thus, in this paper, we propose a solution that can help offload some of that traffic to an opportunistic network created with the attendees’ smartphones, therefore minimizing the costs of the temporary network infrastructure. Using a music festival-based mobility model that we propose and analyze, we introduce two routing algorithms which can enable end-to-end message delivery between participants. The key factors for high performance are social metrics and limiting the number of message copies at any given time. We show that the proposed solutions are able to offer high delivery rates and low delivery delays for various scenarios at a music festival.

UAV-UGV-UMV Multi-Swarms for Cooperative Surveillance

In this paper we present a surveillance system for early detection of escapers from a restricted area based on a new swarming mobility model called CROMM-MS (Chaotic Rössler Mobility Model for Multi-Swarms). CROMM-MS is designed for controlling the trajectories of heterogeneous multi-swarms of aerial, ground and marine unmanned vehicles with important features such as prioritising early detections and success rate. A new Competitive Coevolutionary Genetic Algorithm (CompCGA) is proposed to optimise the vehicles’ parameters and escapers’ evasion ability using a predator-prey approach. Our results show that CROMM-MS is not only viable for surveillance tasks but also that its results are competitive in regard to the state-of-the-art approaches.

DYVIC: DYnamic VIrus Control in Peru

The COVID-19 crisis has produced worldwide changes from people's lifestyles to travel restrictions imposed by world's nations aiming to keep the virus out. Several countries have created digital information applications to help control and manage the COVID-19 crisis, such as the creation of contact tracing apps. The Peruvian government in collaboration with several institutions developed PerúEnTusManos, an epidemiological tracing application. The application uses georeferencing to study users' movements and creates individual mobility patterns from the Peruvian citizens as well as detects crowds. In this article, we present a process to detect possible infected individuals based on probabilities assigned to people that had contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, using data collected from PerúEnTusManos. The preliminary evaluation shows promising results when detecting probabilities of possible infected individuals as well as the most infected districts in Peru. The ultimate goal of the application in Peru is to provide reliable information to health authorities to make informed decisions about the assignations of the available clinical tests and the economic re-activation.

Emerging Inter-Swarm Collaboration for Surveillance Using Pheromones and Evolutionary Techniques

In this article, we propose a new mobility model, called Attractor Based Inter-Swarm collaborationS (ABISS), for improving the surveillance of restricted areas performed by unmanned autonomous vehicles. This approach uses different types of vehicles which explore an area of interest following unpredictable trajectories based on chaotic solutions of dynamic systems. Collaborations between vehicles are meant to cover some regions of the area which are unreachable by members of one swarm, e.g., unmanned ground vehicles on water surface, by using members of another swarm, e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles. Experimental results demonstrate that collaboration is not only possible but also emerges as part of the configurations calculated by a specially designed and parameterised evolutionary algorithm. Experiments were conducted on 12 different case studies including 30 scenarios each, observing an improvement in the total covered area up to 11%, when comparing ABISS with a non-collaborative approach.

Cross-Layer Routing for a Mobility Support Protocol Based on Handover Mechanism in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

Wireless sensor networks with mobile collectors or sinks face some challenges regarding the data collection process and the continuous connectivity and delivering of data while the mobile sink is moving throughout the network. These challenges increase as the network grows. For this aim, we propose in this paper a cross-layer routing protocol which supports mobility for large-scale wireless sensor networks, which we name CLR-MSPH. We adapt CLR-MSPH for the hierarchical architecture of the network, and it performs on cluster-based wireless sensor networks where the network is organized in clusters. Our proposed protocol deals with the problem of handover data after the mobile sink leaves the radio range of cluster head without sending all data stored in the cluster head's buffer. We also introduce a mobility model for the mobile sink for a better data collection process. CLR-MSPH is considered as an extending implementation of BMAC protocol with handover mechanism (BMAC-H). In order to prove the efficiency of the proposed protocol, we compare CLR-MSPH to BMAC-H, where we adapted BMAC-H to perform in cluster-based wireless sensor networks. The simulation results show that CLR-MSPH performs better than BMAC-H in terms of packets reception rate, energy, and latency.

A Survey on Mobility Support in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have attracted research interests from the community, as more promising healthcare applications have a tendency to employ them as underlying network technology. While taking design issues, such as small size hardware as well as low power computing, into account, a lot of research has been proposed to accomplish the given tasks in WBAN. However, since most of the existing works are basically developed by assuming all nodes in the static state, these schemes therefore cannot be applied in real scenarios where network topology between sensor nodes changes frequently and unexpectedly according to human moving behavior. However, as far as the authors know, there is no survey paper to focus on research challenges for mobility support in WBAN yet. To address this deficiency, in this paper, we present the state-of-the-art approaches and discuss the important features of related to mobility in WBAN. We give an overview of mobility model and categorize the models as individual and group. Furthermore, an overview of networking techniques in the recent literature and summary are compiled for comparison in several aspects. The article also suggests potential directions for future research in the field.

A Movement-Assisted Deployment of Collaborating Autonomous Sensors for Indoor and Outdoor Environment Monitoring

Using mobile robots or unmanned vehicles to assist optimal wireless sensors deployment in a working space can significantly enhance the capability to investigate unknown environments. This paper addresses the issues of the application of numerical optimization and computer simulation techniques to on-line calculation of a wireless sensor network topology for monitoring and tracking purposes. We focus on the design of a self-organizing and collaborative mobile network that enables a continuous data transmission to the data sink (base station) and automatically adapts its behavior to changes in the environment to achieve a common goal. The pre-defined and self-configuring approaches to the mobile-based deployment of sensors are compared and discussed. A family of novel algorithms for the optimal placement of mobile wireless devices for permanent monitoring of indoor and outdoor dynamic environments is described. They employ a network connectivity-maintaining mobility model utilizing the concept of the virtual potential function for calculating the motion trajectories of platforms carrying sensors. Their quality and utility have been justified through simulation experiments and are discussed in the final part of the paper.

An agenda-based routing protocol in delay tolerant mobile sensor networks

Routing in delay tolerant mobile sensor networks (DTMSNs) is challenging due to the networks’ intermittent connectivity. Most existing routing protocols for DTMSNs use simplistic random mobility models for algorithm design and performance evaluation. In the real world, however, due to the unique characteristics of human mobility, currently existing random mobility models may not work well in environments where mobile sensor units are carried (such as DTMSNs). Taking a person’s social activities into consideration, in this paper, we seek to improve DTMSN routing in terms of social structure and propose an agenda based routing protocol (ARP). In ARP, humans are classified based on their agendas and data transmission is made according to sensor nodes’ transmission rankings. The effectiveness of ARP is demonstrated through comprehensive simulation studies.