Towards Characterizing Bluetooth Discovery in a Vehicular Context

in Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), 2016 IEEE (2016, December)

Bluetooth has, in recent years, gained more and more momentum. New commodity objects and wearables im- plementing Bluetooth Smart technology (Low Energy) are re- leased everyday. In particular, the ever ... [more ▼]

Bluetooth has, in recent years, gained more and more momentum. New commodity objects and wearables im- plementing Bluetooth Smart technology (Low Energy) are re- leased everyday. In particular, the ever increasing number of discoverable devices both inside and outside a populated area gives us an encouraging insight on future research directions for this technology. In this paper, based on a sensing system developed as an Android application, we evaluate Bluetooth Classic and Low Energy discovery characteristics from a vehic- ular perspective. By recording information about devices nearby (e.g. the number of discovered devices, their signal strength, manufacturer information) and the GPS location we can derive interesting information about a driver’s situation, as well as his/her environment. Presented results indicate that the amount of discovered devices and signal strengths are dependent on velocity and road category. Finally, future work and discussions address potential use-case applications based only on Bluetooth discovery, such as low energy and privacy friendly road and traffic context awareness. The sensing system used in this article is free online under the MIT License. [less ▲]

Understanding User Daily Mobility Using Mobile and Wearable Sensing Systems

in Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Information and Communications Technology Convergence - ICTC 2016 (2016, October)

Recent technological advances and the ever-greater developments in sensing and computing continue to provide new ways of understanding our daily mobility. Smart devices such as smartphones or smartwatches ... [more ▼]

Recent technological advances and the ever-greater developments in sensing and computing continue to provide new ways of understanding our daily mobility. Smart devices such as smartphones or smartwatches can, for instance, provide an enhanced user experience based on different sets of built-in sensors that follow every user action and identify its environment. Monitoring solutions such as these, which are becoming more and more common, allow us to assess human behavior and movement at different levels. In this article, we focus on the concept of human mobility. With the participation of 13 individuals, we carried out an experiment to discover how groups of sensors currently available in smartphones and smartwatches can help to distinguish different profiles and patterns of human mobility. We show that it is possible to use not only motion sensors but also physiological sensors and environmental data provided, for instance, by Wi-Fi. Finally, detailed study of these categories enables us to offer a way of representing the mobility of individual users, based on anonymized traces and graph theory. [less ▲]

SDN coordination for CCN and FC content dissemination in VANETs

in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ad Hoc Networks (ADHOCNETS), Ottawa, ON, Canada (2016, September 26)

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks has a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising and parking notifications, to traffic and emergency warnings. This heterogeneity requires ... [more ▼]

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks has a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising and parking notifications, to traffic and emergency warnings. This heterogeneity requires optimizing content storing, retrieval and forwarding among vehicles to deliver data with short latency and without jeopardizing network resources. In this paper, for a few reference scenarios, we illustrate how approaches that combine Content Centric Networking (CCN) and Floating Content (FC) enable new and efficient solutions to this issue. Moreover, we describe how a network architecture based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) can support both CCN and FC by coordinating distributed caching strategies, by optimizing the packet forwarding process and the availability of floating data items. For each scenario analyzed, we highlight the main research challenges open, and we describe a few possible solutions. [less ▲]

Towards Privacy-Neutral Travel Time Estimation from Mobile Phone Signalling Data

in Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2) (2016, September)

Today’s mobile penetration rates enable cellular signaling data to be useful in diverse fields such as transportation planning, the social sciences and epidemiology. Of particular interest for these ... [more ▼]

Today’s mobile penetration rates enable cellular signaling data to be useful in diverse fields such as transportation planning, the social sciences and epidemiology. Of particular interest for these applications are mobile subscriber dwell times. They express how long users stay in the service range of a base station. In this paper, we want to evaluate whether dwell time distributions can serve as predictors for road travel times. To this end, we transform floating car data into synthetic dwell times that we use as weights in a graph-based model. The model predictions are evaluated using the floating car ground truth data. Additionally, we show a potential link between handover density and travel times. We conclude that dwell times are a promising predictor for travel times, and can serve as a valuable input for intelligent transportation systems. [less ▲]

Not a Tile Out of Place: Toward Creating Context-Dependent User Interfaces on Smartglasses

in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human System Interaction (HSI'16) (2016, July)

Despite the rapid pace of gadgets released on the market, research in the area of usable interfaces for wearables is lagging behind. Smartglasses are new wearables that embed diverse sensors but also have ... [more ▼]

Despite the rapid pace of gadgets released on the market, research in the area of usable interfaces for wearables is lagging behind. Smartglasses are new wearables that embed diverse sensors but also have small displays, and this makes it hard for the wearer to visualize real-time data. To bridge this gap, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a data representation model to combine applications and services that match user activities and contexts. Second, we present an approach of showing relevant services to the user based on 'tiles' (such as those in recent Microsoft Windows interfaces) while considering the device constraints. Finally, we suggest that combining those two aspects can open the way to personalized services for the end user, creating new ways of interacting with applications and devices. [less ▲]

Toward a Characterization of Human Activities using Smart Devices: A Micro/Macro Approach

in Proceedings of the 7th IEEE INFOCOM International Workshop on Mobility Management in the Networks of the Future World (2016, April)

The emergence of new connected devices has opened up new opportunities and allowed to imagine concepts that bring computer sciences and social sciences closer together. In particular, today's increasingly ... [more ▼]

The emergence of new connected devices has opened up new opportunities and allowed to imagine concepts that bring computer sciences and social sciences closer together. In particular, today's increasingly sophisticated miniature sensors allow to track and understand human activities and behavior with a great precision. Taking different approaches and perspectives, we use in this paper smartwatches and smartglasses to explore these behaviors and show that these objects, considered by many as gadgets, have an important role to play in understanding the lives of individuals. The main objective of this work is to introduce two new scales of activity detection, which lacks a formal and consistent definition in the literature. First, we propose a model that precisely detects and interprets movements made by a person wearing smart devices. Then, we use this model to show different interactions between those micro-activities and bigger chunks of behaviors we call macro-activities. Using a new concept based on 3D visualization, we finally show that combining those two scales and using a limited dataset, it is possible to distinguish between different individuals when they are performing very similar activities. The findings of this study lead the way to enhanced user profiling. [less ▲]

Website Fingerprinting at Internet Scale

in Proceedings of the 23rd Internet Society (ISOC) Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2016) (2016, February)

Driving while using a smartphone-based mobility application: Evaluating the impact of three multi-choice user interfaces on visual-manual distraction

in Applied Ergonomics (2016), 54

Innovative in-car applications provided on smartphones can deliver real-time alternative mobility choices and subsequently generate visual-manual demand. Prior studies have found that multi-touch gestures ... [more ▼]

Innovative in-car applications provided on smartphones can deliver real-time alternative mobility choices and subsequently generate visual-manual demand. Prior studies have found that multi-touch gestures such as kinetic scrolling are problematic in this respect. In this study we evaluate three prototype tasks which can be found in common mobile interaction use-cases. In a repeated-measures design, 29 participants interacted with the prototypes in a car-following task within a driving simulator environment. Task completion, driving performance and eye gaze have been analysed. We found that the slider widget used in the filtering task was too demanding and led to poor performance, while kinetic scrolling generated a comparable amount of visual distraction despite it requiring a lower degree of finger pointing accuracy. We discuss how to improve continuous list browsing in a dual-task context. [less ▲]

Understanding the Social impact of ICN: between myth and reality

in AI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication (2016)

The Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is attracting more and more interest from the research community due to its peculiarities that make it one of the best candidates for constructing the ... [more ▼]

The Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is attracting more and more interest from the research community due to its peculiarities that make it one of the best candidates for constructing the Future Internet. For this reason, there are many papers in literature that study how to transform ICN principles in reality in order to magnify its relevance for the society. In order to provide a solid summary of the state of the art, the present contribution tries to summarize the main findings related to this research field. In particular, an overview on the most important ICN architectures, their main aspects, common networking approaches, and differences, is provided. Moreover, the work carried out in standardization bodies, with particular attention to the list of baseline scenarios defined in this context, is illustrated. Also the main international projects that are trying to integrate ICN networking primitives in pioneering use cases are presented, describing proposed architectures and related challenges for enabling information-centric primitives in current network infrastructures. Finally, the work highlights design principles and core components to build ICN-enabled network devices. [less ▲]

Internet of Things in the 5G Era: Enablers, Architecture and Business Models

in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas In Communications (2016)

The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After ... [more ▼]

The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After decades of conceptual inception of the IoT, in recent years a large variety of communication technologies has gradually emerged, reflecting a large diversity of application domains and of communication requirements. Such heterogeneity and fragmentation of the connectivity landscape is currently hampering the full realization of the IoT vision, by posing several complex integration challenges. In this context, the advent of 5G cellular systems, with the availability of a connectivity technology which is at once truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, is considered as a potentially key driver for the yet-to emerge global IoT. In the present paper, we analyze in detail the potential of 5G technologies for the IoT, by considering both the technological and standardization aspects. We review the present-day IoT connectivity landscape, as well as the main 5G enablers for the IoT. Last but not least, we illustrate the massive business shifts that a tight link between IoT and 5G may cause in the operator and vendors ecosystem. [less ▲]