arXiv subjects

Feng Xia

Publications and source records attributed to Feng Xia.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2013

The Power of Smartphones

Smartphones have been shipped with multiple wireless network interfaces in order to meet their diverse communication and networking demands. However, as smartphones increasingly rely on wireless network connections to realize more functions, the demand of energy has been significantly increased, which has become the limit for people to explore smartphones' real power. In this paper, we first review typical smartphone computing systems, energy consumption of smartphone, and state-of-the-art techniques of energy saving for smartphones. Then we propose a location-assisted Wi-Fi discovery scheme, which discovers the nearest Wi-Fi network access points (APs) by using the user's location information. This allows the user to switch to the Wi-Fi interface in an intelligent manner when he/she arrives at the nearest Wi-Fi network AP. Thus we can meet the user's bandwidth needs and provide the best connectivity. Additionally, it avoids the long periods in idle state and greatly reduces the number of unnecessary Wi-Fi scans on the mobile device. Our experiments and simulations demonstrate that our scheme effectively saves energy for smartphones integrated with Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces.

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arXiv2013

Socially-Aware Venue Recommendation for Conference Participants

Current research environments are witnessing high enormities of presentations occurring in different sessions at academic conferences. This situation makes it difficult for researchers (especially juniors) to attend the right presentation session(s) for effective collaboration. In this paper, we propose an innovative venue recommendation algorithm to enhance smart conference participation. Our proposed algorithm, Social Aware Recommendation of Venues and Environments (SARVE), computes the Pearson Correlation and social characteristic information of conference participants. SARVE further incorporates the current context of both the smart conference community and participants in order to model a recommendation process using distributed community detection. Through the integration of the above computations and techniques, we are able to recommend presentation sessions of active participant presenters that may be of high interest to a particular participant. We evaluate SARVE using a real world dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that SARVE outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2013

Evaluating IEEE 802.15.4 for Cyber-Physical Systems

With rapid advancements in sensing, networking, and computing technologies, recent years have witnessed the emergence of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a broad range of application domains. CPS is a new class of engineered systems that features the integration of computation, communications, and control. In contrast to general-purpose computing systems, many cyber-physical applications are safety-cricial. These applications impose considerable requirements on quality of service (QoS) of the employed networking infrastruture. Since IEEE 802.15.4 has been widely considered as a suitable protocol for CPS over wireless sensor and actuator networks, it is of vital importance to evaluate its performance extensively. Serving for this purpose, this paper will analyze the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 standard operating in different modes respectively. Extensive simulations have been conducted to examine how network QoS will be impacted by some critical parameters. The results are presented and analyzed, which provide some useful insights for network parameter configuration and optimization for CPS design.

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arXiv2013

A Search Strategy of Level-Based Flooding for the Internet of Things

This paper deals with the query problem in the Internet of Things (IoT). Flooding is an important query strategy. However, original flooding is prone to cause heavy network loads. To address this problem, we propose a variant of flooding, called Level-Based Flooding (LBF). With LBF, the whole network is divided into several levels according to the distances (i.e., hops) between the sensor nodes and the sink node. The sink node knows the level information of each node. Query packets are broadcast in the network according to the levels of nodes. Upon receiving a query packet, sensor nodes decide how to process it according to the percentage of neighbors that have processed it. When the target node receives the query packet, it sends its data back to the sink node via random walk. We show by extensive simulations that the performance of LBF in terms of cost and latency is much better than that of original flooding, and LBF can be used in IoT of different scales.

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arXiv2013

Mobile Multimedia Recommendation in Smart Communities: A Survey

Due to the rapid growth of internet broadband access and proliferation of modern mobile devices, various types of multimedia (e.g. text, images, audios and videos) have become ubiquitously available anytime. Mobile device users usually store and use multimedia contents based on their personal interests and preferences. Mobile device challenges such as storage limitation have however introduced the problem of mobile multimedia overload to users. In order to tackle this problem, researchers have developed various techniques that recommend multimedia for mobile users. In this survey paper, we examine the importance of mobile multimedia recommendation systems from the perspective of three smart communities, namely, mobile social learning, mobile event guide and context-aware services. A cautious analysis of existing research reveals that the implementation of proactive, sensor-based and hybrid recommender systems can improve mobile multimedia recommendations. Nevertheless, there are still challenges and open issues such as the incorporation of context and social properties, which need to be tackled in order to generate accurate and trustworthy mobile multimedia recommendations.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2013

Socially-Aware Networking: A Survey

The widespread proliferation of handheld devices enables mobile carriers to be connected at anytime and anywhere. Meanwhile, the mobility patterns of mobile devices strongly depend on the users' movements, which are closely related to their social relationships and behaviors. Consequently, today's mobile networks are becoming increasingly human centric. This leads to the emergence of a new field which we call socially-aware networking (SAN). One of the major features of SAN is that social awareness becomes indispensable information for the design of networking solutions. This emerging paradigm is applicable to various types of networks (e.g. opportunistic networks, mobile social networks, delay tolerant networks, ad hoc networks, etc) where the users have social relationships and interactions. By exploiting social properties of nodes, SAN can provide better networking support to innovative applications and services. In addition, it facilitates the convergence of human society and cyber physical systems. In this paper, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we present a survey of this emerging field. Basic concepts of SAN are introduced. We intend to generalize the widely-used social properties in this regard. The state-of-the-art research on SAN is reviewed with focus on three aspects: routing and forwarding, incentive mechanisms and data dissemination. Some important open issues with respect to mobile social sensing and learning, privacy, node selfishness and scalability are discussed.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2013

Safety Challenges and Solutions in Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social networks (MSNs) are specific types of social media which consolidate the ability of omnipresent connection for mobile users/devices to share user-centric data objects among interested users. Taking advantage of the characteristics of both social networks and opportunistic networks, MSNs are capable of providing an efficient and effective mobile environment for users to access, share, and distribute data. However, lack of a protective infrastructure in these networks has turned them in to convenient targets for various perils. This is the main impulse why MSNs carry disparate and intricate safety concerns and embrace divergent safety challenging problems. In this paper, we aim to provide a clear categorization on safety challenges and a deep exploration over some recent solutions in MSNs. This work narrows the safety challenges and solution techniques down from opportunistic networks (OppNets) and delay tolerant networks (DTNs) to MSNs with the hope of covering all the work proposed around security, privacy and trust in MSNs. To conclude, several major open research issues are discussed and future research directions are outlined.

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arXiv2013

Ada-MAC: An Adaptive MAC Protocol for Real-time and Reliable Health Monitoring,

IEEE 802.15.4 is regarded as one of the most suitable communication protocols for cyber-physical applications of wireless sensor and actuator networks. This is because this protocol is able to achieve low-power and low-cost transmission in wireless personal area networks. But most cyber-physical systems (CPSs) require a degree of real-time and reliability from the underlying communication protocol. Some of them are stricter than the others. However, IEEE 802.15.4 protocol cannot provide reliability and real-time transmission for time-critical and delay-sensitive data in cyber-physical applications. To solve this problem, we propose a new MAC protocol, i.e. the Ada-MAC protocol, which is based on IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode. It can support cyber-physical applications such as health monitoring, which require stringent real- time and reliability guarantees. We implement the proposed protocol on the OMNET++ platform and conduct a performance evaluation of the proposed protocol with comparison against the traditional IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. The results are presented and analyzed.

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arXiv2011

A Fault-Tolerant Emergency-Aware Access Control Scheme for Cyber-Physical Systems

Access control is an issue of paramount importance in cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this paper, an access control scheme, namely FEAC, is presented for CPS. FEAC can not only provide the ability to control access to data in normal situations, but also adaptively assign emergency-role and permissions to specific subjects and inform subjects without explicit access requests to handle emergency situations in a proactive manner. In FEAC, emergency-group and emergency-dependency are introduced. Emergencies are processed in sequence within the group and in parallel among groups. A priority and dependency model called PD-AGM is used to select optimal response-action execution path aiming to eliminate all emergencies that occurred within the system. Fault-tolerant access control polices are used to address failure in emergency management. A case study of the hospital medical care application shows the effectiveness of FEAC.

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arXiv2011

A Failure Self-recovery Strategy with Balanced Energy Consumption for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In energy constrained wireless sensor networks, it is significant to make full use of the limited energy and maximize the network lifetime even when facing some unexpected situation. In this paper, all sensor nodes are grouped into clusters, and for each cluster, it has a mobile cluster head to manage the whole cluster. We consider an emergent situation that one of the mobile cluster heads is broken down, and hence the whole cluster is consequently out of work. An efficient approach is proposed for recovering the failure cluster by selecting multiple static sensor nodes as the cluster heads to collect packets and transmit them to the sink node. Improved simulated annealing algorithm is utilized to achieve the uniform deployment of the cluster heads. The new cluster heads are dynamically changed in order to keep balanced energy consumption. Among the new cluster heads, packets are transmitted through multi-hop forwarding path which is cost-lowest path found by Dijkstra's algorithm. A balanced energy consumption model is provided to help find the cost-lowest path and prolong the lifetime of the network. The forwarding path is updated dynamically according to the cost of the path and residual energy of the node in that path. The experimental results show that the failure cluster is recovered and the lifetime of the cluster is prolonged.

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arXiv2011

A Hop-by-hop Cross-layer Congestion Control Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Congestions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) could potentially cause packet loss, throughput impairment and energy waste. To address this issue, a hop-by-hop cross-layer congestion control scheme (HCCC) built on contention-based MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. According to MAC-layer channel information including buffer occupancy ratio and congestion degree of local node, HCCC dynamically adjusts channel access priority in MAC layer and data transmission rate of the node to tackle the problem of congestion. Simulations have been conducted to compare HCCC against closely-related existing schemes. The results show that HCCC exhibits considerable superiority in terms of packets loss ratio, throughput and energy efficiency.

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arXiv2011

Real-Time Performance Analysis of Infrastructure-based IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function

With the increasing popularity of wireless networks, wireless local area networks (WLANs) have attracted significant research interest, which play a critical role in providing anywhere and anytime connectivity. For WLANs the IEEE 802.11 standard is the most mature technology and has been widely adopted for wireless networks. This paper analyzes real-time performance of the IEEE 802.11 standard that adopts the MAC protocol of Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) operating in infrastructure mode. Extensive simulations have been done to examine how the network performance in terms of realtime metrics including effective data rate, latency and packet loss rate will be impacted by some critical parameters (e.g. CWmin and packet payload). The results are presented and analyzed. The analysis of simulation results can provide support for parameter configuration and optimization of WLANs for realtime applications.

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arXiv2011

A Secured Health Care Application Architecture for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) can be viewed as a new generation of systems with integrated control, communication and computational capabilities. Like the internet transformed how humans interact with one another, cyber-physical systems will transform how people interact with the physical world. Currently, the study of CPS is still in its infancy and there exist many research issues and challenges ranging from electricity power, health care, transportation and smart building etc. In this paper, an introduction of CPeSC3 (cyber physical enhanced secured wireless sensor networks (WSNs) integrated cloud computing for u-life care) architecture and its application to the health care monitoring and decision support systems is given. The proposed CPeSC3 architecture is composed of three main components, namely 1) communication core, 2) computation core, and 3) resource scheduling and management core. Detailed analysis and explanation are given for relevant models such as cloud computing, real time scheduling and security models. Finally, a medical health care application scenario is presented based on our practical test-bed which has been built for 3 years.

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arXiv2011

ART-GAS: An Adaptive and Real-Time GTS Allocation Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4

IEEE 802.15.4 supports a Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) allocation mechanism for time-critical and delay-sensitive data transmissions in Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). However, the inflexible first-come-first-served GTS allocation policy and the passive deallocation mechanism significantly reduce network efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive and Real-Time GTS Allocation Scheme (ART-GAS) to provide differentiated services for devices with different priorities, which guarantees data transmissions for time-sensitive and high-traffic devices. The bandwidth utilization in IEEE 802.15.4-based PAN is improved. Simulation results show that our ART-GAS algorithm significantly outperforms the existing GTS mechanism specified in IEEE 802.15.4.

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arXiv2011

Building Smart Communities with Cyber-Physical Systems

There is a growing trend towards the convergence of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and social computing, which will lead to the emergence of smart communities composed of various objects (including both human individuals and physical things) that interact and cooperate with each other. These smart communities promise to enable a number of innovative applications and services that will improve the quality of life. This position paper addresses some opportunities and challenges of building smart communities characterized by cyber-physical and social intelligence.

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arXiv2011

A-GPS Assisted Wi-Fi Access Point Discovery on Mobile Devices for Energy Saving

Mobile devices have been shipped with multiple wireless network interfaces in order to meet their diverse communication and networking demands. In this paper, we propose an A-GPS assisted scheme that discovers the nearest Wi-Fi network access points (APs) by using user's location information. This allows the user to switch to the Wi-Fi interface in an intelligent manner when she/he arrives at the nearest Wi-Fi network AP. Therefore, it avoids the long periods in idle state and greatly reduces the number of unnecessary Wi-Fi scans on the mobile device. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme effectively saves energy for mobile devices integrated with Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2011

Monitoring Energy Consumption of Smartphones

With the rapid development of new and innovative applications for mobile devices like smartphones, advances in battery technology have not kept pace with rapidly growing energy demands. Thus energy consumption has become a more and more important issue of mobile devices. To meet the requirements of saving energy, it is critical to monitor and analyze the energy consumption of applications on smartphones. For this purpose, we develop a smart energy monitoring system called SEMO for smartphones using Android operating system. It can profile mobile applications with battery usage information, which is vital for both developers and users.

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arXiv2011

Energy Efficient Ant Colony Algorithms for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a family of ant colony algorithms called DAACA for data aggregation has been presented which contains three phases: the initialization, packet transmission and operations on pheromones. After initialization, each node estimates the remaining energy and the amount of pheromones to compute the probabilities used for dynamically selecting the next hop. After certain rounds of transmissions, the pheromones adjustment is performed periodically, which combines the advantages of both global and local pheromones adjustment for evaporating or depositing pheromones. Four different pheromones adjustment strategies are designed to achieve the global optimal network lifetime, namely Basic-DAACA, ES-DAACA, MM-DAACA and ACS-DAACA. Compared with some other data aggregation algorithms, DAACA shows higher superiority on average degree of nodes, energy efficiency, prolonging the network lifetime, computation complexity and success ratio of one hop transmission. At last we analyze the characteristic of DAACA in the aspects of robustness, fault tolerance and scalability.

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