Performance evaluation of the RPL Protocol in fixed and mobile sinks low-power and lossy networks.

Low-Power and Lossy-Network (LLN) are usually composed of static nodes, but the increase demand for mobility in mobile robotic and dynamic environment raises the question how a routing protocol for low-power and lossy-networks such as (RPL) would perform if a mobile sink is deployed. In this paper we investigate and evaluate the behaviour of the RPL protocol in fixed and mobile sink environments with respect to different network metrics such as latency, packet delivery ratio (PDR) and energy consumption. Extensive simulation using instant Contiki simulator show significant performance differences between fixed and mobile sink environments. Fixed sink LLNs performed better in terms of average power consumption, latency and packet delivery ratio. The results demonstrated also that RPL protocol is sensitive to mobility and it increases the number of isolated nodes.

Exploring the relationship between impulsivity and decision-making on mobile devices.

Mobile devices offer a common platform for both leisure and work-related tasks but this has resulted in a blurred boundary between home and work. In this paper we explore the security implications of this blurred boundary, both for the worker and the employer. Mobile workers may not always make optimum security-related choices when ‘on the go’ and more impulsive individuals may be particularly affected as they are considered more vulnerable to distraction. In this study we used a task scenario, in which 104 users were asked to choose a wireless network when responding to work demands while out of the office. Eye-tracking data was obtained from a subsample of 40 of these participants in order to explore the effects of impulsivity on attention. Our results suggest that impulsive people are more frequent users of public devices and networks in their day-to-day interactions and are more likely to access their social networks on a regular basis. However they are also likely to make risky decisions when working on-the-go, processing fewer features before making those decisions. These results suggest that those with high impulsivity may make more use of the mobile Internet options for both work and private purposes but they also show attentional behavior patterns that suggest they make less considered security-sensitive decisions. The findings are discussed in terms of designs that might support enhanced deliberation, both in the moment and also in relation to longer term behaviors that would contribute to a better work-life balance.

Work on the Move: mobile and nomadic working methodologies.

‘Work on the move’ is a design, process-driven methodology, which uses multiple locations within an outdoors setting and movement between locations, all of which function as learning places, confined to a specified time period. Between 2012 and 2015, a team of international Higher Education product design educators (all members of Carousel, a co-operation of Erasmus members in Zwolle, Edinburgh, Nantes, Rome, Kortrijk and Oslo), industry professionals and product design students developed and tested four case studies. Each case study was conducted in a different international location and was constructed with a different focus, to help define and refine a definitive working methodology. ‘Work on the move’ explores the influence of ‘place’ upon design, in terms of the impact it has on productivity and creative problem-solving, when working away from the traditional studio/office-based environment. It also explores the significance of shared place, when working directly with a client in situ, and experiencing the place-based influences upon their businesses. While identifying location as part of the design process, the study also seeks to understand the effects of time restriction and working in transit upon creativity and productivity, within the context of specific projects.

Tactile Sensing for Mechatronics: A State of the Art Survey

Lee M.H. and Nicholls H.R., Tactile Sensing for Mechatronics: A State of the Art Survey, Mechatronics, 9, Jan 1999, pp1-31.

Metabolic Engineering, metabolite profiling and machine learning to investigate the phloem-mobile signal in systemic acquired resistance in tobacco

Draper, J., Darby, R.M., Beckmann, M., Maddison, A.L., Mondhe, M., Sheldrick, C., Taylor, J., Goodacre, R., and Kell, D.B. (2002) Metabolic Engineering, metabolite profiling and machine learning to investigate the phloem-mobile signal in systemic acquired resistance in tobacco. First International Congress on Plant Metabolomics, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Evolving mobile robot behaviours in simulation -- a comparison

Walker,J. and Wilson,M.S., 'Evolving mobile robot behaviours in simulation -- a comparison', Towards Intelligent Mobile Robots; Proceedings of the 3rd annual British conference on autonomous mobile robotics and autonomous systems (TIMR'01), 2001

ART: An ontology based tool for the translation of papers into Semantic Web format

To be presented at SIG/ISMB07 ontology workshop: http://bio-ontologies.org.uk/index.php To be published in BMC Bioinformatics. Sponsorship: JISC

Endocrine Inspired Modulation of Artificial Neural Networks for Mobile Robotics

Sauze, C and Neal, M. 'Endocrine Inspired Modulation of Artificial Neural Networks for Mobile Robotics', Dynamics of Learning Behavior and Neuromodulation Workshop, European Conference on Artifical Life 2007, Lisbon, Portugal, September 10th-14th 2007.

From Art to Avant Garde? Television, Formalism and the Arts Documentary in 1960's Britain

Sexton, J. (2008). From Art to Avant Garde? Television, Formalism and the Arts Documentary in 1960's Britain. In L. Mulvey and J. Sexton (Eds.), Experimental British Television (pp.89-105). Manchester: Manchester University Press. RAE2008

Open Issues on TCP for Mobile Computing

We discuss the design principles of TCP within the context of heterogeneous wired/wireless networks and mobile networking. We identify three shortcomings in TCP's behavior: (i) the protocol's error detection mechanism, which does not distinguish different types of errors and thus does not suffice for heterogeneous wired/wireless environments, (ii) the error recovery, which is not responsive to the distinctive characteristics of wireless networks such as transient or burst errors due to handoffs and fading channels, and (iii) the protocol strategy, which does not control the tradeoff between performance measures such as goodput and energy consumption, and often entails a wasteful effort of retransmission and energy expenditure. We discuss a solution-framework based on selected research proposals and the associated evaluation criteria for the suggested modifications. We highlight an important angle that did not attract the required attention so far: the need for new performance metrics, appropriate for evaluating the impact of protocol strategies on battery-powered devices.

Amorphous Placement and Informed Diffusion for Timely Monitoring by Autonomous, Resource-Constrained, Mobile Sensors

Personal communication devices are increasingly equipped with sensors for passive monitoring of encounters and surroundings. We envision the emergence of services that enable a community of mobile users carrying such resource-limited devices to query such information at remote locations in the field in which they collectively roam. One approach to implement such a service is directed placement and retrieval (DPR), whereby readings/queries about a specific location are routed to a node responsible for that location. In a mobile, potentially sparse setting, where end-to-end paths are unavailable, DPR is not an attractive solution as it would require the use of delay-tolerant (flooding-based store-carry-forward) routing of both readings and queries, which is inappropriate for applications with data freshness constraints, and which is incompatible with stringent device power/memory constraints. Alternatively, we propose the use of amorphous placement and retrieval (APR), in which routing and field monitoring are integrated through the use of a cache management scheme coupled with an informed exchange of cached samples to diffuse sensory data throughout the network, in such a way that a query answer is likely to be found close to the query origin. We argue that knowledge of the distribution of query targets could be used effectively by an informed cache management policy to maximize the utility of collective storage of all devices. Using a simple analytical model, we show that the use of informed cache management is particularly important when the mobility model results in a non-uniform distribution of users over the field. We present results from extensive simulations which show that in sparsely-connected networks, APR is more cost-effective than DPR, that it provides extra resilience to node failure and packet losses, and that its use of informed cache management yields superior performance.

An Information Theoretic Framework for Field Monitoring Using Autonomously Mobile Sensors

We consider a mobile sensor network monitoring a spatio-temporal field. Given limited cache sizes at the sensor nodes, the goal is to develop a distributed cache management algorithm to efficiently answer queries with a known probability distribution over the spatial dimension. First, we propose a novel distributed information theoretic approach in which the nodes locally update their caches based on full knowledge of the space-time distribution of the monitored phenomenon. At each time instant, local decisions are made at the mobile nodes concerning which samples to keep and whether or not a new sample should be acquired at the current location. These decisions account for minimizing an entropic utility function that captures the average amount of uncertainty in queries given the probability distribution of query locations. Second, we propose a different correlation-based technique, which only requires knowledge of the second-order statistics, thus relaxing the stringent constraint of having a priori knowledge of the query distribution, while significantly reducing the computational overhead. It is shown that the proposed approaches considerably improve the average field estimation error by maintaining efficient cache content. It is further shown that the correlation-based technique is robust to model mismatch in case of imperfect knowledge of the underlying generative correlation structure.

Service Provisioning in Mobile Networks Through Distributed Coordinated Resource Management

The pervasiveness of personal computing platforms offers an unprecedented opportunity to deploy large-scale services that are distributed over wide physical spaces. Two major challenges face the deployment of such services: the often resource-limited nature of these platforms, and the necessity of preserving the autonomy of the owner of these devices. These challenges preclude using centralized control and preclude considering services that are subject to performance guarantees. To that end, this thesis advances a number of new distributed resource management techniques that are shown to be effective in such settings, focusing on two application domains: distributed Field Monitoring Applications (FMAs), and Message Delivery Applications (MDAs). In the context of FMA, this thesis presents two techniques that are well-suited to the fairly limited storage and power resources of autonomously mobile sensor nodes. The first technique relies on amorphous placement of sensory data through the use of novel storage management and sample diffusion techniques. The second approach relies on an information-theoretic framework to optimize local resource management decisions. Both approaches are proactive in that they aim to provide nodes with a view of the monitored field that reflects the characteristics of queries over that field, enabling them to handle more queries locally, and thus reduce communication overheads. Then, this thesis recognizes node mobility as a resource to be leveraged, and in that respect proposes novel mobility coordination techniques for FMAs and MDAs. Assuming that node mobility is governed by a spatio-temporal schedule featuring some slack, this thesis presents novel algorithms of various computational complexities to orchestrate the use of this slack to improve the performance of supported applications. The findings in this thesis, which are supported by analysis and extensive simulations, highlight the importance of two general design principles for distributed systems. First, a-priori knowledge (e.g., about the target phenomena of FMAs and/or the workload of either FMAs or DMAs) could be used effectively for local resource management. Second, judicious leverage and coordination of node mobility could lead to significant performance gains for distributed applications deployed over resource-impoverished infrastructures.

Forewarding in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Recent advances in processor speeds, mobile communications and battery life have enabled computers to evolve from completely wired to completely mobile. In the most extreme case, all nodes are mobile and communication takes place at available opportunities – using both traditional communication infrastructure as well as the mobility of intermediate nodes. These are mobile opportunistic networks. Data communication in such networks is a difficult problem, because of the dynamic underlying topology, the scarcity of network resources and the lack of global information. Establishing end-to-end routes in such networks is usually not feasible. Instead a store-and-carry forwarding paradigm is better suited for such networks. This dissertation describes and analyzes algorithms for forwarding of messages in such networks. In order to design effective forwarding algorithms for mobile opportunistic networks, we start by first building an understanding of the set of all paths between nodes, which represent the available opportunities for any forwarding algorithm. Relying on real measurements, we enumerate paths between nodes and uncover what we refer to as the path explosion effect. The term path explosion refers to the fact that the number of paths between a randomly selected pair of nodes increases exponentially with time. We draw from the theory of epidemics to model and explain the path explosion effect. This is the first contribution of the thesis, and is a key observation that underlies subsequent results. Our second contribution is the study of forwarding algorithms. For this, we rely on trace driven simulations of different algorithms that span a range of design dimensions. We compare the performance (success rate and average delay) of these algorithms. We make the surprising observation that most algorithms we consider have roughly similar performance. We explain this result in light of the path explosion phenomenon. While the performance of most algorithms we studied was roughly the same, these algorithms differed in terms of cost. This prompted us to focus on designing algorithms with the explicit intent of reducing costs. For this, we cast the problem of forwarding as an optimal stopping problem. Our third main contribution is the design of strategies based on optimal stopping principles which we refer to as Delegation schemes. Our analysis shows that using a delegation scheme reduces cost over naive forwarding by a factor of O(√N), where N is the number of nodes in the network. We further validate this result on real traces, where the cost reduction observed is even greater. Our results so far include a key assumption, which is unbounded buffers on nodes. Next, we relax this assumption, so that the problem shifts to one of prioritization of messages for transmission and dropping. Our fourth contribution is the study of message prioritization schemes, combined with forwarding. Our main result is that one achieves higher performance by assigning higher priorities to young messages in the network. We again interpret this result in light of the path explosion effect.

Amorphous Placement and Retrieval of Sensory Data in Sparse Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract—Personal communication devices are increasingly being equipped with sensors that are able to passively collect information from their surroundings – information that could be stored in fairly small local caches. We envision a system in which users of such devices use their collective sensing, storage, and communication resources to query the state of (possibly remote) neighborhoods. The goal of such a system is to achieve the highest query success ratio using the least communication overhead (power). We show that the use of Data Centric Storage (DCS), or directed placement, is a viable approach for achieving this goal, but only when the underlying network is well connected. Alternatively, we propose, amorphous placement, in which sensory samples are cached locally and informed exchanges of cached samples is used to diffuse the sensory data throughout the whole network. In handling queries, the local cache is searched first for potential answers. If unsuccessful, the query is forwarded to one or more direct neighbors for answers. This technique leverages node mobility and caching capabilities to avoid the multi-hop communication overhead of directed placement. Using a simplified mobility model, we provide analytical lower and upper bounds on the ability of amorphous placement to achieve uniform field coverage in one and two dimensions. We show that combining informed shuffling of cached samples upon an encounter between two nodes, with the querying of direct neighbors could lead to significant performance improvements. For instance, under realistic mobility models, our simulation experiments show that amorphous placement achieves 10% to 40% better query answering ratio at a 25% to 35% savings in consumed power over directed placement.