The Impact of Human Mobility on Edge Data Center Deployment in Urban Environments

in IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Waikoloa, HI, USA, 2019 (2019, December)

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) brings storage and computational capabilities at the edge of the network into so-called Edge Data Centers (EDCs) to better low-latency applications. To this end ... [more ▼]

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) brings storage and computational capabilities at the edge of the network into so-called Edge Data Centers (EDCs) to better low-latency applications. To this end, effective placement of EDCs in urban environments is key for proper load balance and to minimize outages. In this paper, we specifically tackle this problem. To fully understand how the computational demand of EDCs varies, it is fundamental to analyze the complex dynamics of cities. Our work takes into account the mobility of citizens and their spatial patterns to estimate the optimal placement of MEC EDCs in urban environments in order to minimize outages. To this end, we propose and compare two heuristics. In particular, we present the mobility-aware deployment algorithm (MDA) that outperforms approaches that do not consider citizens mobility. Simulations are conducted in Luxembourg City by extending the CrowdSenSim simulator and show that efficient EDCs placement significantly reduces outages. [less ▲]

A Survey on Mobile Crowdsensing Systems: Challenges, Solutions, and Opportunities

in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (2019), 21(3, thirdquarter 2019), 2419-2465

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has gained significant attention in recent years and has become an appealing paradigm for urban sensing. For data collection, MCS systems rely on contribution from mobile devices ... [more ▼]

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has gained significant attention in recent years and has become an appealing paradigm for urban sensing. For data collection, MCS systems rely on contribution from mobile devices of a large number of participants or a crowd. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices are deployed widely and already equipped with a rich set of sensors, making them an excellent source of information. Mobility and intelligence of humans guarantee higher coverage and better context awareness if compared to traditional sensor networks. At the same time, individuals may be reluctant to share data for privacy concerns. For this reason, MCS frameworks are specifically designed to include incentive mechanisms and address privacy concerns. Despite the growing interest in the research community, MCS solutions need a deeper investigation and categorization on many aspects that span from sensing and communication to system management and data storage. In this paper, we take the research on MCS a step further by presenting a survey on existing works in the domain and propose a detailed taxonomy to shed light on the current landscape and classify applications, methodologies, and architectures. Our objective is not only to analyze and consolidate past research but also to outline potential future research directions and synergies with other research areas. [less ▲]

Profiling Energy Efficiency of Mobile Crowdsensing Data Collection Frameworks for Smart City Applications

in The 6th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Cloud Computing, Services, and Engineering (IEEE Mobile Cloud 2018) (2018, March)

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has emerged in the last years and has become one of the most prominent paradigms for urban sensing. In MCS, citizens actively participate in the sensing process by contributing ... [more ▼]

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has emerged in the last years and has become one of the most prominent paradigms for urban sensing. In MCS, citizens actively participate in the sensing process by contributing data with their smartphones, tablets, wearables and other mobile devices to a collector. As citizens sustain costs while contributing data, i.e., the energy spent from the batteries for sensing and reporting, devising energy efficient data collection frameworks (DCFs) is essential. In this work, we compare the energy efficiency of several DCFs through CrowdSenSim, which allows to perform large-scale simulation experiments in realistic urban environments. Specifically, the DCFs under analysis differ one with each other by the data reporting mechanism implemented and the signaling between users and the collector needed for sensing and reporting decisions. Results reveal that the key criterion differentiating DCFs' energy consumption is the data reporting mechanism. In principle, continuous reporting to the collector should be more energy consuming than probabilistic reporting. However, DCFs with continuous reporting that implement mechanisms to block sensing and data delivery after a certain amount of contribution are more effective in harvesting data from the crowd. [less ▲]

Cost analysis of Smart Lighting Solutions for Smart Cities

in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Paris, France, 2017 (2017, May)

Lighting is an essential community service, but current implementations are not energy efficient and impact on the energy budget of the municipalities for at least 40\%. In this paper, we propose ... [more ▼]

Lighting is an essential community service, but current implementations are not energy efficient and impact on the energy budget of the municipalities for at least 40\%. In this paper, we propose heuristics and devise a comparison methodology for new smart lighting solutions in next generation smart cities. The proposed smart lighting techniques make use of Internet of Things (IoT) augmented lamppost, which save energy by turning off or dimming the light according to the presence of citizens. Assessing costs and benefits in adopting the new smart lighting solutions is a pillar step for municipalities to foster real implementation. For evaluation purposes, we have developed a custom simulator which enables the deployment of lampposts in realistic urban environments. The citizens travel on foot along the streets and trigger activation of the lampposts according to the proposed heuristics. For the city of Luxembourg, the results highlight that replacing all existing lamps with LEDs and dimming light intensity according to the presence of users nearby the lampposts is convenient and provides an economical return already after the first year of deployment. [less ▲]

CrowdSenSim: a Simulation Platform for Mobile Crowdsensing in Realistic Urban Environments

in IEEE Access (2017)

Smart cities take advantage of recent ICT developments to provide added value to existing public services and improve quality of life for the citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm makes the ... [more ▼]

Smart cities take advantage of recent ICT developments to provide added value to existing public services and improve quality of life for the citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm makes the Internet more pervasive where objects equipped with computing, storage and sensing capabilities are interconnected with communication technologies. Because of the widespread diffusion of IoT devices, applying the IoT paradigm to smart cities is an excellent solution to build sustainable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platforms. Having citizens involved in the process through mobile crowdsensing (MCS) techniques augments capabilities of these ICT platforms without additional costs. For proper operation, MCS systems require the contribution from a large number of participants. Simulations are therefore a candidate tool to assess the performance of MCS systems. In this paper, we illustrate the design of CrowdSenSim, a simulator for mobile crowdsensing. CrowdSenSim is designed specifically for realistic urban environments and smart cities services. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CrowdSenSim for the most popular MCS sensing paradigms (participatory and opportunistic) and we present its applicability using a smart public street lighting scenario. [less ▲]

Game-Theoretic Recruitment of Sensing Service Providers for Trustworthy Cloud-Centric Internet-of-Things (IoT) Applications

in IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) Workshops: Fifth International Workshop on Cloud Computing Systems, Networks, and Applications (CCSNA) (2016, December)

Widespread use of connected smart devices that are equipped with various built-in sensors has introduced the mobile crowdsensing concept to the IoT-driven information and communication applications ... [more ▼]

Widespread use of connected smart devices that are equipped with various built-in sensors has introduced the mobile crowdsensing concept to the IoT-driven information and communication applications. Mobile crowdsensing requires implicit collaboration between the crowdsourcer/recruiter platforms and users. Additionally, users need to be incentivized by the crowdsensing platform because each party aims to maximize their utility. Due to the participatory nature of data collection, trustworthiness and truthfulness pose a grand challenge in crowdsensing systems in the presence of malicious users, who either aim to manipulate sensed data or collaborate unfaithfully with the motivation of maximizing their income. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic approach for trustworthiness-driven user recruitment in mobile crowdsensing systems that consists of three phases: i) user recruitment, ii) collaborative decision making on trust scores, and iii) badge rewarding. Our proposed framework incentivizes the users through a sub-game perfect equilibrium (SPE) and gamification techniques. Through simulations, we show that the platform utility can be improved by up to the order of 50\% while the average user utility can be increased by at least 15\% when compared to fully-distributed and user-centric trustworthy crowdsensing. [less ▲]

Assessing Performance of Internet of Things-based Mobile Crowdsensing Systems for Sensing as a Service Applications in Smart Cities

in 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom) (2016, December)

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm makes the Internet more pervasive. IoT devices are objects equipped with computing, storage and sensing capabilities and they are interconnected with communication ... [more ▼]

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm makes the Internet more pervasive. IoT devices are objects equipped with computing, storage and sensing capabilities and they are interconnected with communication technologies. Smart cities exploit the most advanced information technologies to improve public services. For being effective, smart cities require a massive amount of data, typically gathered from sensors. The application of the IoT paradigm to smart cities is an excellent solution to build sustainable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platforms and to produce a large amount of data following Sensing as a Service (S^2aaS) business models. Having citizens involved in the process through mobile crowdsensing (MCS) techniques unleashes potential benefits as MCS augments the capabilities of existing sensing platforms. To this date, it remains an open challenge to quantify the costs the users sustain to contribute data with IoT devices such as the energy from the batteries and the amount of data generated at city-level. In this paper, we analyze existing solutions, we provide guidelines to design a large-scale urban level simulator and we present preliminary results from a prototype. [less ▲]

Smart Probabilistic Fingerprinting for Indoor Localization over Fog Computing Platforms

in IEEE 5th International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), Pisa, Italy (2016, October)

Indoor navigation and localization are becoming fundamental services nowadays. WiFi-based solutions such as FingerPrinting (FP) are the most widely adopted techniques for positioning and provide better ... [more ▼]

Indoor navigation and localization are becoming fundamental services nowadays. WiFi-based solutions such as FingerPrinting (FP) are the most widely adopted techniques for positioning and provide better results if compared to other approaches. It requires to compare WiFi Received Signal Strength (RSS) with an pre-computed radio map called fingerprint. The recently proposed Smart Probabilistic FingerPrinting (P-FP) algorithm reduces the computational complexity of the traditional FP approach without any accuracy detriment. On the other hand, fog computing has emerged as a new promising paradigm in the recent years, which extends traditional mobile cloud computing capabilities towards the edge of the network and enables location- aware services. In this paper we propose to offload Smart P-FP computation over a fog platform exploiting a novel distributed algorithm. Performance evaluation validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach with the analysis of: i) the amount of power saved and ii) the efficiency of candidate selection process for offloading. Having 2 or more devices in the vicinity contributing to the computation makes offloading beneficial from a power standpoint. The offloading effectiveness increases with the number of devices willing to contribute and the amount of data to be transferred. Power savings can be as high as 80% if compared with local computation. [less ▲]

Service Level Agreemnet Assurance between Cloud Services Providers and CLoud Customers

in Butterfield, Evan; Kellenberger, Patrick (Eds.) Proceedings of 16th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing CCGrid 2016 (2016, May 19)

Cloud services providers deliver cloud services to cloud customers on pay-per-use model while the quality of the provided services are defined using service level agreements also known as SLAs ... [more ▼]

Cloud services providers deliver cloud services to cloud customers on pay-per-use model while the quality of the provided services are defined using service level agreements also known as SLAs. Unfortunately, there is no standard mechanism which exists to verify and assure that delivered services satisfy the signed SLA agreement in an automatic way. There is no guarantee in terms of quality. Those applications have many performance metrics. In this doctoral thesis, we propose a framework for SLA assurance, which can be used by both cloud providers and cloud users. Inside the proposed framework, we will define the performance metrics for the different applications. We will assess the applications performance in different testing environment to assure good services quality as mentioned in SLA. The proposed framework will be evaluated through simulations and using testbed experiments. After testing the applications performance by measuring the performance metrics, we will review the time correlations between those metrics. [less ▲]

Network Coding-based Content Distribution in Cellular Access Networks

in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2016 (2016, May)

Mobile cloud applications have become extremely popular in the last years. Location-based services, navigation, online gaming and social networking are a representative set of “always on” cloud ... [more ▼]

Mobile cloud applications have become extremely popular in the last years. Location-based services, navigation, online gaming and social networking are a representative set of “always on” cloud applications in which the same or partially overlapping content is delivered to multiple users. Network coding is a well matching solution to improve content delivery. In this paper we propose the vNC-CELL technique, which uses network coding to combine information flows carrying the same or overlapping content that has to be delivered to co-located users. vNC-CELL executes coding functionalities in a mobile cloud through virtualization as these operations are computationally intensive if performed locally at the base station. Performance evaluation obtained from NS-3 simulations confirms vNC-CELL ability to improve network throughput and reduce download times for the users. [less ▲]