How can social interactions improve data collection in a delay-tolerant network?
Objective: Investigating social behavior of humans carrying wireless devices and studying trajectories for visiting good relays
Advisors:
Dr. Aline Carneiro Viana, ASAP, INRIA, France
Dr. Marcelo D. de Amorim, LIP6, Univ. Paris VI, France
Subject description
Emerging environments where a multitude of portable devices carried by people are making available communication and computing resources for anywhere and anytime connectivity, are nowadays a common scenario. Such pervasive scenario and the requirement for the formation of an Internet of People face a still higher demand in extreme environments when no networking infrastructure is available. Consider the problem of people retrieval or relief aid’s information dissemination in a disaster scenario, where landlines may be destroyed and cellular networks temporarily overwhelmed. A social-aware opportunistic communication among portable devices could be the only way for data exchange. The idea behind this kind of communication is to use any contact opportunity to send data and rely on social knowledge about users behavior to better infer the time and place to meet good contacts for message dissemination or delivery.
However, the user mobility imposes to devices (e.g. PDA, health monitoring sensors, vehicular communication devices) different communication challenges as forwarding paths may be unstable and devices reachability may be highly variable. Clearly, these issues change the network communication problem drastically.
Goal
The originality here is then (1) the investigation of the cyclic user mobility both in terms of geographic occupancy and social interactions and (2) the evaluation of the relative importance of mobile users and geographic regions in a considered workplace. Our goal is to use these analyses to select users to serve as good relays for performing network tasks, like data dissemination, delivery or collection in a collaborative fashion.
For this, the internship will have to exploit the problem of disseminating messages through a network with episodic connectivity without a priori knowledge of node schedules or locations. In addition, considering the characteristics of ferrying networks, we intend to predict future contacts by taking advantages of knowledge concerning node mobility, habits or social interactions, and then, route information. The proposed solutions should be able to detect and to adapt to connectivity variations in the network, and still to guarantee a reliable, scalable, and robust data delivery. The evaluation of the proposed solutions by simulation and/or mathematical analyses is also expected.
Requirements
According to her/his background, the internship is expected to work either along a theoretical line, or a more applied line. Moreover, a strong background on wireless communication, protocol design, and practical experimentation is requires. Candidates should be able to perform good critial analyses of obtained results and be creative in proposing solutions. International journals and conferences publications, as well as, technical reports are also expected.
Interested candidates should contact the advisors mentioned in the top of this page, by sending their CV and at least one recommendation letter.
Keywords
Delay tolerant networks, social network, centrality, popularity, mobile wireless devices, social interaction, data collection
