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Published work

89 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Stable Multimodal Graph Unlearning via Feature-Dimension Aware Quantile Selection

Graph unlearning remains a critical technique for supporting privacy-preserving and sustainable multimodal graph learning. However, we observe that existing unlearning strategies tend to apply uniform parameter selection and editing across all graph neural network (GNN) layers, which is especially harmful for multimodal graphs where high-dimensional input projections encode dominant cross-modal knowledge. As a result, over-editing these sensitive layers often leads to catastrophic utility degradation after forgetting, undermining both stable learning and effective privacy protection. To address this gap, we propose FDQ, a Feature-Dimension Aware Quantile framework for multimodal graph unlearning. FDQ adaptively identifies high-dimensional input projection layers and applies more conservative, FDQ-guided quantile thresholds when constructing suppression sets, while keeping the underlying importance estimation mechanism unchanged. FDQ is seamlessly integrated with diagonal sensitivity-based parameter importance analysis to enable efficient node and edge unlearning under general forget requests. Through extensive experiments on Ele-Fashion and Goodreads-NC, we demonstrate that FDQ consistently achieves strong utility preservation while maintaining effective forgetting against membership inference attacks. Overall, FDQ offers a principled and robust solution for privacy-aware unlearning in high-dimensional multimodal graph systems.

preprint2023arXiv

Balanced Graph Structure Information for Brain Disease Detection

Analyzing connections between brain regions of interest (ROI) is vital to detect neurological disorders such as autism or schizophrenia. Recent advancements employ graph neural networks (GNNs) to utilize graph structures in brains, improving detection performances. Current methods use correlation measures between ROI's blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals to generate the graph structure. Other methods use the training samples to learn the optimal graph structure through end-to-end learning. However, implementing those methods independently leads to some issues with noisy data for the correlation graphs and overfitting problems for the optimal graph. In this work, we proposed Bargrain (balanced graph structure for brains), which models two graph structures: filtered correlation matrix and optimal sample graph using graph convolution networks (GCNs). This approach aims to get advantages from both graphs and address the limitations of only relying on a single type of structure. Based on our extensive experiment, Bargrain outperforms state-of-the-art methods in classification tasks on brain disease datasets, as measured by average F1 scores.

preprint2022arXiv

CenGCN: Centralized Convolutional Networks with Vertex Imbalance for Scale-Free Graphs

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved impressive performance in a wide variety of areas, attracting considerable attention. The core step of GCNs is the information-passing framework that considers all information from neighbors to the central vertex to be equally important. Such equal importance, however, is inadequate for scale-free networks, where hub vertices propagate more dominant information due to vertex imbalance. In this paper, we propose a novel centrality-based framework named CenGCN to address the inequality of information. This framework first quantifies the similarity between hub vertices and their neighbors by label propagation with hub vertices. Based on this similarity and centrality indices, the framework transforms the graph by increasing or decreasing the weights of edges connecting hub vertices and adding self-connections to vertices. In each non-output layer of the GCN, this framework uses a hub attention mechanism to assign new weights to connected non-hub vertices based on their common information with hub vertices. We present two variants CenGCN\_D and CenGCN\_E, based on degree centrality and eigenvector centrality, respectively. We also conduct comprehensive experiments, including vertex classification, link prediction, vertex clustering, and network visualization. The results demonstrate that the two variants significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

CHIEF: Clustering with Higher-order Motifs in Big Networks

Clustering a group of vertices in networks facilitates applications across different domains, such as social computing and Internet of Things. However, challenges arises for clustering networks with increased scale. This paper proposes a solution which consists of two motif clustering techniques: standard acceleration CHIEF-ST and approximate acceleration CHIEF-AP. Both algorithms first find the maximal k-edge-connected subgraphs within the target networks to lower the network scale, then employ higher-order motifs in clustering. In the first procedure, we propose to lower the network scale by optimizing the network structure with maximal k-edge-connected subgraphs. For CHIEF-ST, we illustrate that all target motifs will be kept after this procedure when the minimum node degree of the target motif is equal or greater than k. For CHIEF-AP, we prove that the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix and the Laplacian matrix are relatively stable after this step. That is, CHIEF-ST has no influence on motif clustering, whereas CHIEF-AP introduces limited yet acceptable impact. In the second procedure, we employ higher-order motifs, i.e., heterogeneous four-node motifs clustering in higher-order dense networks. The contributions of CHIEF are two-fold: (1) improved efficiency of motif clustering for big networks; (2) verification of higher-order motif significance. The proposed solutions are found to outperform baseline approaches according to experiments on real and synthetic networks, which demonstrates CHIEF's strength in large network analysis. Meanwhile, higher-order motifs are proved to perform better than traditional triangle motifs in clustering.

preprint2022arXiv

Data-Driven Decision Making in COVID-19 Response: A Survey

COVID-19 has spread all over the world, having an enormous effect on our daily life and work. In response to the epidemic, a lot of important decisions need to be taken to save communities and economies worldwide. Data clearly plays a vital role in effective decision making. Data-driven decision making uses data related evidence and insights to guide the decision making process and to verify the plan of action before it is committed. To better handle the epidemic, governments and policy making institutes have investigated abundant data originating from COVID-19. These data include those related to medicine, knowledge, media, etc. Based on these data, many prevention and control policies are made. In this survey paper, we summarize the progress of data-driven decision making in the response to COVID-19, including COVID-19 prevention and control, psychological counselling, financial aid, work resumption, and school re-opening. We also propose some current challenges and open issues in data-driven decision making, including data collection and quality, complex data analysis, and fairness in decision making. This survey paper sheds light on current policy making driven by data, which also provides a feasible direction for further scientific research.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep Graph Learning for Anomalous Citation Detection

Anomaly detection is one of the most active research areas in various critical domains, such as healthcare, fintech, and public security. However, little attention has been paid to scholarly data, i.e., anomaly detection in a citation network. Citation is considered as one of the most crucial metrics to evaluate the impact of scientific research, which may be gamed in multiple ways. Therefore, anomaly detection in citation networks is of significant importance to identify manipulation and inflation of citations. To address this open issue, we propose a novel deep graph learning model, namely GLAD (Graph Learning for Anomaly Detection), to identify anomalies in citation networks. GLAD incorporates text semantic mining to network representation learning by adding both node attributes and link attributes via graph neural networks. It exploits not only the relevance of citation contents but also hidden relationships between papers. Within the GLAD framework, we propose an algorithm called CPU (Citation PUrpose) to discover the purpose of citation based on citation texts. The performance of GLAD is validated through a simulated anomalous citation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAD on the anomalous citation detection task.

preprint2022arXiv

Detecting Outlier Patterns with Query-based Artificially Generated Searching Conditions

In the age of social computing, finding interesting network patterns or motifs is significant and critical for various areas such as decision intelligence, intrusion detection, medical diagnosis, social network analysis, fake news identification, national security, etc. However, sub-graph matching remains a computationally challenging problem, let alone identifying special motifs among them. This is especially the case in large heterogeneous real-world networks. In this work, we propose an efficient solution for discovering and ranking human behavior patterns based on network motifs by exploring a user's query in an intelligent way. Our method takes advantage of the semantics provided by a user's query, which in turn provides the mathematical constraint that is crucial for faster detection. We propose an approach to generate query conditions based on the user's query. In particular, we use meta paths between nodes to define target patterns as well as their similarities, leading to efficient motif discovery and ranking at the same time. The proposed method is examined on a real-world academic network, using different similarity measures between the nodes. The experiment result demonstrates that our method can identify interesting motifs, and is robust to the choice of similarity measures.

preprint2022arXiv

Familiarity-based Collaborative Team Recognition in Academic Social Networks

Collaborative teamwork is key to major scientific discoveries. However, the prevalence of collaboration among researchers makes team recognition increasingly challenging. Previous studies have demonstrated that people are more likely to collaborate with individuals they are familiar with. In this work, we employ the definition of familiarity and then propose MOTO (faMiliarity-based cOllaborative Team recOgnition algorithm) to recognize collaborative teams. MOTO calculates the shortest distance matrix within the global collaboration network and the local density of each node. Central team members are initially recognized based on local density. Then MOTO recognizes the remaining team members by using the familiarity metric and shortest distance matrix. Extensive experiments have been conducted upon a large-scale data set. The experimental results show that compared with baseline methods, MOTO can recognize the largest number of teams. The teams recognized by MOTO possess more cohesive team structures and lower team communication costs compared with other methods. MOTO utilizes familiarity in team recognition to identify cohesive academic teams. The recognized teams are in line with real-world collaborative teamwork patterns. Based on team recognition using MOTO, the research team structure and performance are further analyzed for given time periods. The number of teams that consist of members from different institutions increases gradually. Such teams are found to perform better in comparison with those whose members are from the same institution.

preprint2022arXiv

Graph Augmentation Learning

Graph Augmentation Learning (GAL) provides outstanding solutions for graph learning in handling incomplete data, noise data, etc. Numerous GAL methods have been proposed for graph-based applications such as social network analysis and traffic flow forecasting. However, the underlying reasons for the effectiveness of these GAL methods are still unclear. As a consequence, how to choose optimal graph augmentation strategy for a certain application scenario is still in black box. There is a lack of systematic, comprehensive, and experimentally validated guideline of GAL for scholars. Therefore, in this survey, we in-depth review GAL techniques from macro (graph), meso (subgraph), and micro (node/edge) levels. We further detailedly illustrate how GAL enhance the data quality and the model performance. The aggregation mechanism of augmentation strategies and graph learning models are also discussed by different application scenarios, i.e., data-specific, model-specific, and hybrid scenarios. To better show the outperformance of GAL, we experimentally validate the effectiveness and adaptability of different GAL strategies in different downstream tasks. Finally, we share our insights on several open issues of GAL, including heterogeneity, spatio-temporal dynamics, scalability, and generalization.

preprint2022arXiv

Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey

Deep learning on graphs has attracted significant interests recently. However, most of the works have focused on (semi-) supervised learning, resulting in shortcomings including heavy label reliance, poor generalization, and weak robustness. To address these issues, self-supervised learning (SSL), which extracts informative knowledge through well-designed pretext tasks without relying on manual labels, has become a promising and trending learning paradigm for graph data. Different from SSL on other domains like computer vision and natural language processing, SSL on graphs has an exclusive background, design ideas, and taxonomies. Under the umbrella of graph self-supervised learning, we present a timely and comprehensive review of the existing approaches which employ SSL techniques for graph data. We construct a unified framework that mathematically formalizes the paradigm of graph SSL. According to the objectives of pretext tasks, we divide these approaches into four categories: generation-based, auxiliary property-based, contrast-based, and hybrid approaches. We further describe the applications of graph SSL across various research fields and summarize the commonly used datasets, evaluation benchmark, performance comparison and open-source codes of graph SSL. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and potential future directions in this research field.

preprint2022arXiv

Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Explainable Recommendation over Academic Networks

With the explosive growth of new graduates with research degrees every year, unprecedented challenges arise for early-career researchers to find a job at a suitable institution. This study aims to understand the behavior of academic job transition and hence recommend suitable institutions for PhD graduates. Specifically, we design a deep learning model to predict the career move of early-career researchers and provide suggestions. The design is built on top of scholarly/academic networks, which contains abundant information about scientific collaboration among scholars and institutions. We construct a heterogeneous scholarly network to facilitate the exploring of the behavior of career moves and the recommendation of institutions for scholars. We devise an unsupervised learning model called HAI (Heterogeneous graph Attention InfoMax) which aggregates attention mechanism and mutual information for institution recommendation. Moreover, we propose scholar attention and meta-path attention to discover the hidden relationships between several meta-paths. With these mechanisms, HAI provides ordered recommendations with explainability. We evaluate HAI upon a real-world dataset against baseline methods. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

preprint2022arXiv

How to optimize an academic team when the outlier member is leaving?

An academic team is a highly-cohesive collaboration group of scholars, which has been recognized as an effective way to improve scientific output in terms of both quality and quantity. However, the high staff turnover brings about a series of problems that may have negative influence on team performance. To address this challenge, we first detect the tendency of the member who may potentially leave. Here the outlierness is defined with respect to familiarity, which is quantified by using collaboration intensity. It is assumed that if a team member has a higher familiarity with scholars outside the team, then this member might probably leave the team. To minimize the influence caused by the leaving of such an outlier member, we propose an optimization solution to find a proper candidate who can replace the outlier member. Based on random walk with graph kernel, our solution involves familiarity matching, skill matching, as well as structure matching. The proposed approach proves to be effective and outperforms existing methods when applied to computer science academic teams.

preprint2022arXiv

MSCET: A Multi-Scenario Offloading Schedule for Biomedical Data Processing and Analysis in Cloud-Edge-Terminal Collaborative Vehicular Networks

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoTs), an increasing number of computation intensive or delay sensitive biomedical data processing and analysis tasks are produced in vehicles, bringing more and more challenges to the biometric monitoring of drivers. Edge computing is a new paradigm to solve these challenges by offloading tasks from the resource-limited vehicles to Edge Servers (ESs) in Road Side Units (RSUs). However, most of the traditional offloading schedules for vehicular networks concentrate on the edge, while some tasks may be too complex for ESs to process. To this end, we consider a collaborative vehicular network in which the cloud, edge and terminal can cooperate with each other to accomplish the tasks. The vehicles can offload the computation intensive tasks to the cloud to save the resource of edge. We further construct the virtual resource pool which can integrate the resource of multiple ESs since some regions may be covered by multiple RSUs. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Scenario offloading schedule for biomedical data processing and analysis in Cloud-Edge-Terminal collaborative vehicular networks called MSCET. The parameters of the proposed MSCET are optimized to maximize the system utility. We also conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed MSCET and the results illustrate that MSCET outperforms other existing schedules.

preprint2022arXiv

Surf or sleep? Understanding the influence of bedtime patterns on campus

Poor sleep habits may cause serious problems of mind and body, and it is a commonly observed issue for college students due to study workload as well as peer and social influence. Understanding its impact and identifying students with poor sleep habits matters a lot in educational management. Most of the current research is either based on self-reports and questionnaires, suffering from a small sample size and social desirability bias, or the methods used are not suitable for the education system. In this paper, we develop a general data-driven method for identifying students' sleep patterns according to their Internet access pattern stored in the education management system and explore its influence from various aspects. First, we design a Possion-based probabilistic mixture model to cluster students according to the distribution of bedtime and identify students who are used to staying up late. Second, we profile students from five aspects (including eight dimensions) based on campus-behavior data and build Bayesian networks to explore the relationship between behavioral characteristics and sleeping habits. Finally, we test the predictability of sleeping habits. This paper not only contributes to the understanding of student sleep from a cognitive and behavioral perspective but also presents a new approach that provides an effective framework for various educational institutions to detect the sleeping patterns of students.

preprint2022arXiv

The Gene of Scientific Success

This paper elaborates how to identify and evaluate causal factors to improve scientific impact. Currently, analyzing scientific impact can be beneficial to various academic activities including funding application, mentor recommendation, and discovering potential cooperators etc. It is universally acknowledged that high-impact scholars often have more opportunities to receive awards as an encouragement for their hard working. Therefore, scholars spend great efforts in making scientific achievements and improving scientific impact during their academic life. However, what are the determinate factors that control scholars' academic success? The answer to this question can help scholars conduct their research more efficiently. Under this consideration, our paper presents and analyzes the causal factors that are crucial for scholars' academic success. We first propose five major factors including article-centered factors, author-centered factors, venue-centered factors, institution-centered factors, and temporal factors. Then, we apply recent advanced machine learning algorithms and jackknife method to assess the importance of each causal factor. Our empirical results show that author-centered and article-centered factors have the highest relevancy to scholars' future success in the computer science area. Additionally, we discover an interesting phenomenon that the h-index of scholars within the same institution or university are actually very close to each other.

preprint2022arXiv

Web of Scholars: A Scholar Knowledge Graph

In this work, we demonstrate a novel system, namely Web of Scholars, which integrates state-of-the-art mining techniques to search, mine, and visualize complex networks behind scholars in the field of Computer Science. Relying on the knowledge graph, it provides services for fast, accurate, and intelligent semantic querying as well as powerful recommendations. In addition, in order to realize information sharing, it provides an open API to be served as the underlying architecture for advanced functions. Web of Scholars takes advantage of knowledge graph, which means that it will be able to access more knowledge if more search exist. It can be served as a useful and interoperable tool for scholars to conduct in-depth analysis within Science of Science.

preprint2021arXiv

Graph Force Learning

Features representation leverages the great power in network analysis tasks. However, most features are discrete which poses tremendous challenges to effective use. Recently, increasing attention has been paid on network feature learning, which could map discrete features to continued space. Unfortunately, current studies fail to fully preserve the structural information in the feature space due to random negative sampling strategy during training. To tackle this problem, we study the problem of feature learning and novelty propose a force-based graph learning model named GForce inspired by the spring-electrical model. GForce assumes that nodes are in attractive forces and repulsive forces, thus leading to the same representation with the original structural information in feature learning. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Furthermore, GForce opens up opportunities to use physics models to model node interaction for graph learning.

preprint2021arXiv

Network Representation Learning: From Traditional Feature Learning to Deep Learning

Network representation learning (NRL) is an effective graph analytics technique and promotes users to deeply understand the hidden characteristics of graph data. It has been successfully applied in many real-world tasks related to network science, such as social network data processing, biological information processing, and recommender systems. Deep Learning is a powerful tool to learn data features. However, it is non-trivial to generalize deep learning to graph-structured data since it is different from the regular data such as pictures having spatial information and sounds having temporal information. Recently, researchers proposed many deep learning-based methods in the area of NRL. In this survey, we investigate classical NRL from traditional feature learning method to the deep learning-based model, analyze relationships between them, and summarize the latest progress. Finally, we discuss open issues considering NRL and point out the future directions in this field.

preprint2020arXiv

A Survey on Human-centric Communications in Non-cooperative Wireless Relay Networks

The performance of data delivery in wireless relay networks (WRNs), such as delay-tolerant networks and device-to-device communications heavily relies on the cooperation of mobile nodes (i.e., users and their carried devices). However, selfish nodes may refuse to relay data to others or share their resources with them due to various reasons, such as resource limitations or social preferences. Meanwhile, misbehaving nodes can launch different types of internal attacks (e.g., blackhole and trust-related attacks) to disrupt the normal operation of the network. Numerous mechanisms have been recently proposed to establish secure and efficient communications in WRNs in the presence of selfish and malicious nodes (referred as non-cooperative WRNs). In this paper, we present an in-depth survey on human-centric communication challenges and solutions in the non-cooperative WRNs that focuses on: (1) an overview of the non-cooperative WRNs and introduction to various types of node selfish and malicious behaviors, (2) the impact analysis of node selfish and malicious behaviors on the performance of data forwarding and distribution, (3) selfish and malicious node detection and defense systems, and (4) incentive mechanisms. Finally, we discuss several open problems and future research challenges.

preprint2020arXiv

An Overview on Evaluating and Predicting Scholarly Article Impact

Scholarly article impact reflects the significance of academic output recognised by academic peers, and it often plays a crucial role in assessing the scientific achievements of researchers, teams, institutions and countries. It is also used for addressing various needs in the academic and scientific arena, such as recruitment decisions, promotions, and funding allocations. This article provides a comprehensive review of recent progresses related to article impact assessment and prediction. The~review starts by sharing some insight into the article impact research and outlines current research status. Some core methods and recent progress are presented to outline how article impact metrics and prediction have evolved to consider integrating multiple networks. Key techniques, including statistical analysis, machine learning, data mining and network science, are discussed. In particular, we highlight important applications of each technique in article impact research. Subsequently, we discuss the open issues and challenges of article impact research. At the same time, this review points out some important research directions, including article impact evaluation by considering Conflict of Interest, time and location information, various distributions of scholarly entities, and rising stars.

preprint2020arXiv

BeeCup: A Bio-Inspired Energy-Efficient Clustering Protocol for Mobile Learning

Mobile devices have become a popular tool for ubiquitous learning in recent years. Multiple mobile users can be connected via ad hoc networks for the purpose of learning. In this context, due to limited battery capacity, energy efficiency of mobile devices becomes a very important factor that remarkably affects the user experience of mobile learning. Based on the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, we propose a new clustering protocol, namely BeeCup, to save the energy of mobile devices while guaranteeing the quality of learning. The BeeCup protocol takes advantage of biologically-inspired computation, with focus on improving the energy efficiency of mobile devices. It first estimates the number of cluster heads (CHs) adaptively according to the network scale, and then selects the CHs by employing the ABC algorithm. In case some CHs consume energy excessively, clusters will be dynamically updated to keep energy consumption balanced within the whole network. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed protocol.

preprint2020arXiv

Big Networks: A Survey

A network is a typical expressive form of representing complex systems in terms of vertices and links, in which the pattern of interactions amongst components of the network is intricate. The network can be static that does not change over time or dynamic that evolves through time. The complication of network analysis is different under the new circumstance of network size explosive increasing. In this paper, we introduce a new network science concept called big network. Big networks are generally in large-scale with a complicated and higher-order inner structure. This paper proposes a guideline framework that gives an insight into the major topics in the area of network science from the viewpoint of a big network. We first introduce the structural characteristics of big networks from three levels, which are micro-level, meso-level, and macro-level. We then discuss some state-of-the-art advanced topics of big network analysis. Big network models and related approaches, including ranking methods, partition approaches, as well as network embedding algorithms are systematically introduced. Some typical applications in big networks are then reviewed, such as community detection, link prediction, recommendation, etc. Moreover, we also pinpoint some critical open issues that need to be investigated further.

preprint2020arXiv

Data Dissemination Using Interest Tree in Socially Aware Networking

Socially aware networking (SAN) exploits social characteristics of mobile users to streamline data dissemination protocols in opportunistic environments. Existing protocols in this area utilized various social features such as user interests, social similarity, and community structure to improve the performance of data dissemination. However, the interrelationship between user interests and its impact on the efficiency of data dissemination has not been explored sufficiently. In this paper, we analyze various kinds of relationships between user interests and model them using a layer-based structure in order to form social communities in SAN paradigm. We propose Int-Tree, an Interest-Tree based scheme which uses the relationship between user interests to improve the performance of data dissemination. The core of Int-Tree is the interest-tree, a tree-based community structure that combines two social features, i.e. density of a community and social tie, to support data dissemination. The simulation results show that Int-Tree achieves higher delivery ratio, lower overhead, in comparison to two benchmark protocols, PROPHET and Epidemic routing. In addition, Int-Tree can perform with 1.36 hop counts in average, and tolerable latency in terms of buffer size, time to live (TTL) and simulation duration. Finally, Int-Tree keeps stable performance with various parameters.

preprint2020arXiv

Data-driven Computational Social Science: A Survey

Social science concerns issues on individuals, relationships, and the whole society. The complexity of research topics in social science makes it the amalgamation of multiple disciplines, such as economics, political science, and sociology, etc. For centuries, scientists have conducted many studies to understand the mechanisms of the society. However, due to the limitations of traditional research methods, there exist many critical social issues to be explored. To solve those issues, computational social science emerges due to the rapid advancements of computation technologies and the profound studies on social science. With the aids of the advanced research techniques, various kinds of data from diverse areas can be acquired nowadays, and they can help us look into social problems with a new eye. As a result, utilizing various data to reveal issues derived from computational social science area has attracted more and more attentions. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we present a survey on data-driven computational social science for the first time which primarily focuses on reviewing application domains involving human dynamics. The state-of-the-art research on human dynamics is reviewed from three aspects: individuals, relationships, and collectives. Specifically, the research methodologies used to address research challenges in aforementioned application domains are summarized. In addition, some important open challenges with respect to both emerging research topics and research methods are discussed.

preprint2020arXiv

DINE: A Framework for Deep Incomplete Network Embedding

Network representation learning (NRL) plays a vital role in a variety of tasks such as node classification and link prediction. It aims to learn low-dimensional vector representations for nodes based on network structures or node attributes. While embedding techniques on complete networks have been intensively studied, in real-world applications, it is still a challenging task to collect complete networks. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose a Deep Incomplete Network Embedding method, namely DINE. Specifically, we first complete the missing part including both nodes and edges in a partially observable network by using the expectation-maximization framework. To improve the embedding performance, we consider both network structures and node attributes to learn node representations. Empirically, we evaluate DINE over three networks on multi-label classification and link prediction tasks. The results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach compared against state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2020arXiv

Human Mobility in Opportunistic Networks: Characteristics, Models and Prediction Methods

Opportunistic networks (OppNets) are modern types of intermittently connected networks in which mobile users communicate with each other via their short-range devices to share data among interested observers. In this setting, humans are the main carriers of mobile devices. As such, this mobility can be exploited by retrieving inherent user habits, interests, and social features for the simulation and evaluation of various scenarios. Several research challenges concerning human mobility in OppNets have been explored in the literature recently. In this paper, we present a thorough survey of human mobility issues in three main groups (1) mobility characteristics, (2) mobility models and traces, and (3) mobility prediction techniques. Firstly, spatial, temporal, and connectivity properties of human motion are explored. Secondly, real mobility traces which have been captured using Bluetooth/Wi-Fi technologies or location-based social networks are summarized. Furthermore, simulation-based mobility models are categorized and state-of-the art articles in each category are highlighted. Thirdly, new human mobility prediction techniques which aim to forecast the three aspects of human mobility, i.e., users' next walks, stay duration and contact opportunities are studied comparatively. To conclude, some major open issues are outlined.

preprint2020arXiv

Implicit Multi-feature Learning for Dynamic Time Series Prediction of the Impact of Institutions

Predicting the impact of research institutions is an important tool for decision makers, such as resource allocation for funding bodies. Despite significant effort of adopting quantitative indicators to measure the impact of research institutions, little is known that how the impact of institutions evolves in time. Previous researches have focused on using the historical relevance scores of different institutions to predict potential future impact for these institutions. In this paper, we explore the factors that can drive the changes of the impact of institutions, finding that the impact of an institution, as measured by the number of the accepted papers of the institution, more is determined by the authors' influence of the institution. Geographic location of institution feature and state GDP can drive the changes of the impact of institutions. Identifying these features allows us to formulate a predictive model that integrates the effects of individual ability, location of institution, and state GDP. The model unveils the underlying factors driving the future impact of institutions, which can be used to accurately predict the future impact of institutions.

preprint2020arXiv

Improving Smart Conference Participation through Socially-Aware Recommendation

This research addresses recommending presentation sessions at smart conferences to participants. We propose a venue recommendation algorithm, Socially-Aware Recommendation of Venues and Environments (SARVE). SARVE computes correlation and social characteristic information of conference participants. In order to model a recommendation process using distributed community detection, SARVE further integrates the current context of both the smart conference community and participants. SARVE recommends presentation sessions that may be of high interest to each participant. We evaluate SARVE using a real world dataset. In our experiments, we compare SARVE to two related state-of-the-art methods, namely: Context-Aware Mobile Recommendation Services (CAMRS) and Conference Navigator (Recommender) Model. Our experimental results show that in terms of the utilized evaluation metrics: precision, recall, and f-measure, SARVE achieves more reliable and favorable social (relations and context) recommendation results.

preprint2020arXiv

Judging a Book by Its Cover: The Effect of Facial Perception on Centrality in Social Networks

Facial appearance matters in social networks. Individuals frequently make trait judgments from facial clues. Although these face-based impressions lack the evidence to determine validity, they are of vital importance, because they may relate to human network-based social behavior, such as seeking certain individuals for help, advice, dating, and cooperation, and thus they may relate to centrality in social networks. However, little to no work has investigated the apparent facial traits that influence network centrality, despite the large amount of research on attributions of the central position including personality and behavior. In this paper, we examine whether perceived traits based on facial appearance affect network centrality by exploring the initial stage of social network formation in a first-year college residential area. We took face photos of participants who are freshmen living in the same residential area, and we asked them to nominate community members linking to different networks. We then collected facial perception data by requiring other participants to rate facial images for three main attributions: dominance, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Meanwhile, we proposed a framework to discover how facial appearance affects social networks. Our results revealed that perceived facial traits were correlated with the network centrality and that they were indicative to predict the centrality of people in different networks. Our findings provide psychological evidence regarding the interaction between faces and network centrality. Our findings also offer insights in to a combination of psychological and social network techniques, and they highlight the function of facial bias in cuing and signaling social traits. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore the influence of facial perception on centrality in social networks.

preprint2020arXiv

MODEL: Motif-based Deep Feature Learning for Link Prediction

Link prediction plays an important role in network analysis and applications. Recently, approaches for link prediction have evolved from traditional similarity-based algorithms into embedding-based algorithms. However, most existing approaches fail to exploit the fact that real-world networks are different from random networks. In particular, real-world networks are known to contain motifs, natural network building blocks reflecting the underlying network-generating processes. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding algorithm that incorporates network motifs to capture higher-order structures in the network. To evaluate its effectiveness for link prediction, experiments were conducted on three types of networks: social networks, biological networks, and academic networks. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms both the traditional similarity-based algorithms by 20% and the state-of-the-art embedding-based algorithms by 19%.

preprint2020arXiv

Multivariate Relations Aggregation Learning in Social Networks

Multivariate relations are general in various types of networks, such as biological networks, social networks, transportation networks, and academic networks. Due to the principle of ternary closures and the trend of group formation, the multivariate relationships in social networks are complex and rich. Therefore, in graph learning tasks of social networks, the identification and utilization of multivariate relationship information are more important. Existing graph learning methods are based on the neighborhood information diffusion mechanism, which often leads to partial omission or even lack of multivariate relationship information, and ultimately affects the accuracy and execution efficiency of the task. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the multivariate relationship aggregation learning (MORE) method, which can effectively capture the multivariate relationship information in the network environment. By aggregating node attribute features and structural features, MORE achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence speed. We conducted experiments on one citation network and five social networks. The experimental results show that the MORE model has higher accuracy than the GCN (Graph Convolutional Network) model in node classification tasks, and can significantly reduce time cost.

preprint2020arXiv

OFFER: A Motif Dimensional Framework for Network Representation Learning

Aiming at better representing multivariate relationships, this paper investigates a motif dimensional framework for higher-order graph learning. The graph learning effectiveness can be improved through OFFER. The proposed framework mainly aims at accelerating and improving higher-order graph learning results. We apply the acceleration procedure from the dimensional of network motifs. Specifically, the refined degree for nodes and edges are conducted in two stages: (1) employ motif degree of nodes to refine the adjacency matrix of the network; and (2) employ motif degree of edges to refine the transition probability matrix in the learning process. In order to assess the efficiency of the proposed framework, four popular network representation algorithms are modified and examined. By evaluating the performance of OFFER, both link prediction results and clustering results demonstrate that the graph representation learning algorithms enhanced with OFFER consistently outperform the original algorithms with higher efficiency.

preprint2020arXiv

Overhead Control with Reliable Transmission of Popular Packets in Ad-Hoc Social Networks

Reliable social connectivity and transmission of data for popular nodes is vital in multihop Ad-hoc Social Networks (ASNETs). In this networking paradigm, transmission unreliability could be caused by multiple social applications running on a single node. This leads to contentions among nodes and connection paths. In addition, congestions can be the result of multiple senders transmitting data to a single receiver and every sender waiting for a positive acknowledgment to move on. Therefore, traditional Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performs poorly in ASNETs, due to the fact that the available bandwidth is shared among nodes using round trip time and the acknowledgment is provided individually to every data packet. To solve these issues, we propose a technique, called Overhead Control with Reliable Transmission of Popular Packets in Ad-Hoc Social Networks (RTPS), which improves transmission reliability by assigning bandwidth to users based on their popularity levels: extra bandwidth is assigned to the nodes with higher popularity and their acknowledgments are sent with higher priority. In addition, RTPS further reduces contentions and packet losses by delaying acknowledgment packet transmissions. Our detailed investigations demonstrate the excellent performance of RTPS in terms of throughput latency and overhead with different hop-distances and different numbers of concurrent TCP flows.

preprint2020arXiv

Phone2Cloud: Exploiting Computation Offloading for Energy Saving on Smartphones in Mobile Cloud Computing

With prosperity of applications on smartphones, energy saving for smartphones has drawn increasing attention. In this paper we devise Phone2Cloud, a computation offloading-based system for energy saving on smartphones in the context of mobile cloud computing. Phone2Cloud offloads computation of an application running on smartphones to the cloud. The objective is to improve energy efficiency of smartphones and at the same time, enhance the application's performance through reducing its execution time. In this way, the user's experience can be improved. We implement the prototype of Phone2Cloud on Android and Hadoop environment. Two sets of experiments, including application experiments and scenario experiments, are conducted to evaluate the system. The experimental results show that Phone2Cloud can effectively save energy for smartphones and reduce the application's execution time.

preprint2020arXiv

PIS: A Multi-dimensional Routing Protocol for Socially-aware Networking

Socially-aware networking is an emerging paradigm for intermittently connected networks consisting of mobile users with social relationships and characteristics. In this setting, humans are the main carriers of mobile devices. Hence, their connections, social features, and behaviors can be exploited to improve the performance of data forwarding protocols. In this paper, we first explore the impact of three social features, namely physical proximity, user interests, and social relationship on users' daily routines. Then, we propose a multi-dimensional routing protocol called Proximity-Interest-Social (PIS) protocol in which the three different social dimensions are integrated into a unified distance function in order to select optimal intermediate data carriers. PIS protocol utilizes a time slot management mechanism to discover users' movement similarities in different time periods during a day. We compare the performance of PIS to Epidemic, PROPHET, and SimBet routing protocols using SIGCOMM09 and INFOCOM06 data sets. The experiment results show that PIS outperforms other benchmark routing protocols with the highest data delivery ratio with a low communication overhead.

preprint2020arXiv

Prediction Methods and Applications in the Science of Science: A Survey

Science of science has become a popular topic that attracts great attentions from the research community. The development of data analytics technologies and the readily available scholarly data enable the exploration of data-driven prediction, which plays a pivotal role in finding the trend of scientific impact. In this paper, we analyse methods and applications in data-driven prediction in the science of science, and discuss their significance. First, we introduce the background and review the current state of the science of science. Second, we review data-driven prediction based on paper citation count, and investigate research issues in this area. Then, we discuss methods to predict scholar impact, and we analyse different approaches to promote the scholarly collaboration in the collaboration network. This paper also discusses open issues and existing challenges, and suggests potential research directions.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantifying Success in Science: An Overview

Quantifying success in science plays a key role in guiding funding allocations, recruitment decisions, and rewards. Recently, a significant amount of progresses have been made towards quantifying success in science. This lack of detailed analysis and summary continues a practical issue. The literature reports the factors influencing scholarly impact and evaluation methods and indices aimed at overcoming this crucial weakness. We focus on categorizing and reviewing the current development on evaluation indices of scholarly impact, including paper impact, scholar impact, and journal impact. Besides, we summarize the issues of existing evaluation methods and indices, investigate the open issues and challenges, and provide possible solutions, including the pattern of collaboration impact, unified evaluation standards, implicit success factor mining, dynamic academic network embedding, and scholarly impact inflation. This paper should help the researchers obtaining a broader understanding of quantifying success in science, and identifying some potential research directions.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantifying the Impact of Scholarly Papers Based on Higher-Order Weighted Citations

Quantifying the impact of a scholarly paper is of great significance, yet the effect of geographical distance of cited papers has not been explored. In this paper, we examine 30,596 papers published in Physical Review C, and identify the relationship between citations and geographical distances between author affiliations. Subsequently, a relative citation weight is applied to assess the impact of a scholarly paper. A higher-order weighted quantum PageRank algorithm is also developed to address the behavior of multiple step citation flow. Capturing the citation dynamics with higher-order dependencies reveals the actual impact of papers, including necessary self-citations that are sometimes excluded in prior studies. Quantum PageRank is utilized in this paper to help differentiating nodes whose PageRank values are identical.

preprint2020arXiv

Random Walks: A Review of Algorithms and Applications

A random walk is known as a random process which describes a path including a succession of random steps in the mathematical space. It has increasingly been popular in various disciplines such as mathematics and computer science. Furthermore, in quantum mechanics, quantum walks can be regarded as quantum analogues of classical random walks. Classical random walks and quantum walks can be used to calculate the proximity between nodes and extract the topology in the network. Various random walk related models can be applied in different fields, which is of great significance to downstream tasks such as link prediction, recommendation, computer vision, semi-supervised learning, and network embedding. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of classical random walks and quantum walks. We first review the knowledge of classical random walks and quantum walks, including basic concepts and some typical algorithms. We also compare the algorithms based on quantum walks and classical random walks from the perspective of time complexity. Then we introduce their applications in the field of computer science. Finally we discuss the open issues from the perspectives of efficiency, main-memory volume, and computing time of existing algorithms. This study aims to contribute to this growing area of research by exploring random walks and quantum walks together.

preprint2020arXiv

Scientific Article Recommendation: Exploiting Common Author Relations and Historical Preferences

Scientific article recommender systems are playing an increasingly important role for researchers in retrieving scientific articles of interest in the coming era of big scholarly data. Most existing studies have designed unified methods for all target researchers and hence the same algorithms are run to generate recommendations for all researchers no matter which situations they are in. However, different researchers may have their own features and there might be corresponding methods for them resulting in better recommendations. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation method which incorporates information on common author relations between articles (i.e., two articles with the same author(s)). The rationale underlying our method is that researchers often search articles published by the same author(s). Since not all researchers have such author-based search patterns, we present two features, which are defined based on information about pairwise articles with common author relations and frequently appeared authors, to determine target researchers for recommendation. Extensive experiments we performed on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the defined features are effective to determine relevant target researchers and the proposed method generates more accurate recommendations for relevant researchers when compared to a Baseline method.

preprint2020arXiv

Scientific Paper Recommendation: A Survey

Globally, recommendation services have become important due to the fact that they support e-commerce applications and different research communities. Recommender systems have a large number of applications in many fields including economic, education, and scientific research. Different empirical studies have shown that recommender systems are more effective and reliable than keyword-based search engines for extracting useful knowledge from massive amounts of data. The problem of recommending similar scientific articles in scientific community is called scientific paper recommendation. Scientific paper recommendation aims to recommend new articles or classical articles that match researchers' interests. It has become an attractive area of study since the number of scholarly papers increases exponentially. In this survey, we first introduce the importance and advantages of paper recommender systems. Second, we review the recommendation algorithms and methods, such as Content-Based methods, Collaborative Filtering methods, Graph-Based methods and Hybrid methods. Then, we introduce the evaluation methods of different recommender systems. Finally, we summarize open issues in the paper recommender systems, including cold start, sparsity, scalability, privacy, serendipity and unified scholarly data standards. The purpose of this survey is to provide comprehensive reviews on scholarly paper recommendation.

preprint2020arXiv

Shifu2: A Network Representation Learning Based Model for Advisor-advisee Relationship Mining

The advisor-advisee relationship represents direct knowledge heritage, and such relationship may not be readily available from academic libraries and search engines. This work aims to discover advisor-advisee relationships hidden behind scientific collaboration networks. For this purpose, we propose a novel model based on Network Representation Learning (NRL), namely Shifu2, which takes the collaboration network as input and the identified advisor-advisee relationship as output. In contrast to existing NRL models, Shifu2 considers not only the network structure but also the semantic information of nodes and edges. Shifu2 encodes nodes and edges into low-dimensional vectors respectively, both of which are then utilized to identify advisor-advisee relationships. Experimental results illustrate improved stability and effectiveness of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we generate a large-scale academic genealogy dataset by taking advantage of Shifu2.

preprint2020arXiv

Social-Similarity-aware TCP with Collision Avoidance in Ad-hoc Social Networks

Ad-hoc Social Network (ASNET), which explores social connectivity between users of mobile devices, is becoming one of the most important forms of today's internet. In this context, maximum bandwidth utilization of intermediate nodes in resource scarce environments is one of the challenging tasks. Traditional Transport Control Protocol (TCP) uses the round trip time mechanism for sharing bandwidth resources between users. However, it does not explore socially-aware properties between nodes and cannot differentiate effectively between various types of packet losses in wireless networks. In this paper, a socially-aware congestion avoidance protocol, namely TIBIAS, which takes advantage of similarity matching social properties among intermediate nodes, is proposed to improve the resource efficiency of ASNETs. TIBIAS performs efficient data transfer over TCP. During the course of bandwidth resource allocation, it gives high priority for maximally matched interest similarity between different TCP connections on ASNET links. TIBIAS does not require any modification at lower layers or on receiver nodes. Experimental results show that TIBIAS performs better as compared against existing protocols, in terms of link utilization, unnecessary reduction of the congestion window, throughput and retransmission ratio.

preprint2020arXiv

Socially-Aware Conference Participant Recommendation with Personality Traits

As a result of the importance of academic collaboration at smart conferences, various researchers have utilized recommender systems to generate effective recommendations for participants. Recent research has shown that the personality traits of users can be used as innovative entities for effective recommendations. Nevertheless, subjective perceptions involving the personality of participants at smart conferences are quite rare and haven't gained much attention. Inspired by the personality and social characteristics of users, we present an algorithm called Socially and Personality Aware Recommendation of Participants (SPARP). Our recommendation methodology hybridizes the computations of similar interpersonal relationships and personality traits among participants. SPARP models the personality and social characteristic profiles of participants at a smart conference. By combining the above recommendation entities, SPARP then recommends participants to each other for effective collaborations. We evaluate SPARP using a relevant dataset. Experimental results confirm that SPARP is reliable and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2020arXiv

The dominance of big teams in China's scientific output

Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent finding shows that teams with both large and small sizes are essential in research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country's scientific work is carried out by big/small teams. Here, using over 26 million publications from Web of Science, we find that China's research output is more dominated by big teams than the rest of the world, which is particularly the case in fields of natural science. Despite the global trend that more papers are done by big teams, China's drop in small team output is much steeper. As teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative works does not increase as much as that in other countries. Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small team works than the National Science Foundation of U.S. (NSF) does, implying that big teams are more preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which urges a need to balance small and big teams.

preprint2020arXiv

The Role of Positive and Negative Citations in Scientific Evaluation

Quantifying the impact of scientific papers objectively is crucial for research output assessment, which subsequently affects institution and country rankings, research funding allocations, academic recruitment and national/international scientific priorities. While most of the assessment schemes based on publication citations may potentially be manipulated through negative citations, in this study, we explore Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships and discover negative citations and subsequently weaken the associated citation strength. PANDORA (Positive And Negative COI- Distinguished Objective Rank Algorithm) has been developed, which captures the positive and negative COI, together with the positive and negative suspected COI relationships. In order to alleviate the influence caused by negative COI relationship, collaboration times, collaboration time span, citation times and citation time span are employed to determine the citing strength; while for positive COI relationship, we regard it as normal citation relationship. Furthermore, we calculate the impact of scholarly papers by PageRank and HITS algorithms, based on a credit allocation algorithm which is utilized to assess the impact of institutions fairly and objectively. Experiments are conducted on the publication dataset from American Physical Society (APS) dataset, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the current solutions in Recommendation Intensity of list R at top-K and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient at top-K.

preprint2020arXiv

Understanding the Advisor-advisee Relationship via Scholarly Data Analysis

Advisor-advisee relationship is important in academic networks due to its universality and necessity. Despite the increasing desire to analyze the career of newcomers, however, the outcomes of different collaboration patterns between advisors and advisees remain unknown. The purpose of this paper is to find out the correlation between advisors' academic characteristics and advisees' academic performance in Computer Science. Employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that with the increase of advisors' academic age, advisees' performance experiences an initial growth, follows a sustaining stage, and finally ends up with a declining trend. We also discover the phenomenon that accomplished advisors can bring up skilled advisees. We explore the conclusion from two aspects: (1) Advisees mentored by advisors with high academic level have better academic performance than the rest; (2) Advisors with high academic level can raise their advisees' h-index ranking. This work provides new insights on promoting our understanding of the relationship between advisors' academic characteristics and advisees' performance, as well as on advisor choosing.

preprint2020arXiv

User Popularity-based Packet Scheduling for Congestion Control in Ad-hoc Social Networks

Traditional ad-hoc network packet scheduling schemes cannot fulfill the requirements of proximity-based ad-hoc social networks (ASNETs) and they do not behave properly in congested environments. To address this issue, we propose a user popularity-based packet scheduling scheme for congestion control in ASNETs called Pop-aware. The proposed algorithm exploits social popularity of sender nodes to prioritize all incoming flows. Pop-aware also provides fairness of service received by each flow. We evaluate the performance of Pop-aware through a series of simulations. In comparison with some existing scheduling algorithms, Pop-aware performs better in terms of control overhead, total overhead, average throughput, packet loss rate, packet delivery rate and average delay.

preprint2016arXiv

Adaptive Beaconing Approaches for Vehicular ad hoc Networks: A Survey

Vehicular communication requires vehicles to self-organize through the exchange of periodic beacons. Recent analysis on beaconing indicates that the standards for beaconing restrict the desired performance of vehicular applications. This situation can be attributed to the quality of the available transmission medium, persistent change in the traffic situation and the inability of standards to cope with application requirements. To this end, this paper is motivated by the classifications and capability evaluations of existing adaptive beaconing approaches. To begin with, we explore the anatomy and the performance requirements of beaconing. Then, the beaconing design is analyzed to introduce a design-based beaconing taxonomy. A survey of the state-of-the-art is conducted with an emphasis on the salient features of the beaconing approaches. We also evaluate the capabilities of beaconing approaches using several key parameters. A comparison among beaconing approaches is presented, which is based on the architectural and implementation characteristics. The paper concludes by discussing open challenges in the field.

preprint2014arXiv

A Survey on Routing and Data Dissemination in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks

Opportunistic mobile social networks (MSNs) are modern paradigms of delay tolerant networks that consist of mobile users with social characteristics. The users in MSNs communicate with each other to share data objects. In this setting, humans are the carriers of mobile devices, hence their social features such as movement patterns, similarities, and interests can be exploited to design efficient data forwarding algorithms. In this paper, an overview of routing and data dissemination issues in the context of opportunistic MSNs is presented, with focus on (1) MSN characteristics, (2) human mobility models, (3) dynamic community detection methods, and (4) routing and data dissemination protocols. Firstly, characteristics of MSNs which lead to the exposure of patterns of interaction among mobile users are examined. Secondly, properties of human mobility models are discussed and recently proposed mobility models are surveyed. Thirdly, community detection and evolution analysis algorithms are investigated. Then, a comparative review of state-of-the-art routing and data dissemination algorithms for MSNs is presented, with special attention paid to critical issues like context-awareness and user selfishness. Based on the literature review, some important open issues are finally discussed.

preprint2013arXiv

A Coverage Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks in a Three-dimensional Environment

Coverage is one of the fundamental issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It reflects the ability of WSNs to detect the fields of interest. In a real sensor networks application, the detection area is always non-ideal and the terrain of the detection area is often more complex in applications of three-dimensional sensor networks. Consequently, many of the existing coverage strategies cannot be directly applied to three-dimensional spaces. This paper presents a new coverage strategy for the three-dimensional sensor networks. Sensor nodes are uniformly distributed. The cost factor is utilized to construct the perceived probability and the classical watershed algorithm after the transformation of points from the three-dimensional space to the two-dimensional plane using the dimensionality reduction method, which can maintain the topology characteristic of the non-linear terrain. The detection probability in the optimal breath path is used as the measure to evaluate the coverage. Simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy can determine the coverage with fewer nodes, while achieving the coverage requirements of the networks.

preprint2013arXiv

A Localization Strategy Based on N-times Trilateral Centroid with Weight

Localization based on received signal strength indication (RSSI) is a low cost and low complexity technology, and it is widely applied in distance-based localization of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Error of existed localization technologies is significant. This paper presents the N-times trilateral centroid weighted localization algorithm (NTCWLA), which can reduce the error considerably. Considering the instability of RSSI, we use the weighted average of many RSSIs as current RSSI. To improve the accuracy we select a number of (no less than three) reliable beacon nodes to increase the localization times. Then we calculate the distances between reliable beacon nodes and the mobile node using an empirical formula. The mobile node is located N times using the trilateral centroid algorithm. Finally, we take the weighted average of the filtered reference coordinates as the mobile node's coordinates. We conduct experiments with the STM32W108 chip which supports IEEE 802.15.4. The results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the trilateral centroid algorithm.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2013arXiv

An Energy-Efficient Localization Strategy for Smartphones

In recent years, smartphones have become prevalent. Much attention is being paid to developing and making use of mobile applications that require position information. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a very popular localization technique used by these applications because of its high accuracy. However, GPS incurs an unacceptable energy consumption, which severely limits the use of smartphones and reduces the battery lifetime. Then an urgent requirement for these applications is a localization strategy that not only provides enough accurate position information to meet users' need but also consumes less energy. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient localization strategy for smartphone applications. On one hand, it can dynamically estimate the next localization time point to avoid unnecessary localization operations. On the other hand, it can also automatically select the energy-optimal localization method. We evaluate the strategy through a series of simulations. Experimental results show that it can significantly reduce the localization energy consumption of smartphones while ensuring a good satisfaction degree.

preprint2013arXiv

An Optimal ODAM-Based Broadcast Algorithm for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Broadcast routing has become an important research field for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) recently. However, the packet delivery rate is generally low in existing VANET broadcast routing protocols. Therefore, the design of an appropriate broadcast protocol based on the features of VANET has become a crucial part of the development of VANET. This paper analyzes the disadvantage of existing broadcast routing protocols in VANETs, and proposes an improved algorithm (namely ODAM-C) based on the ODAM (Optimized Dissemination of Alarm Messages) protocol. The ODAM-C algorithm improves the packet delivery rate by two mechanisms based on the forwarding features of ODAM. The first distance-based mechanism reduces the possibility of packet loss by considering the angles between source nodes, forwarding nodes and receiving nodes. The second mechanism increases the redundancy of forwarding nodes to guarantee the packet success delivery ratio. We show by analysis and simulations that the proposed algorithm can improve packet delivery rate for vehicular networks compared against two widely-used existing protocols.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2013arXiv

Iterative Nearest Neighborhood Oversampling in Semisupervised Learning from Imbalanced Data

Transductive graph-based semi-supervised learning methods usually build an undirected graph utilizing both labeled and unlabeled samples as vertices. Those methods propagate label information of labeled samples to neighbors through their edges in order to get the predicted labels of unlabeled samples. Most popular semi-supervised learning approaches are sensitive to initial label distribution happened in imbalanced labeled datasets. The class boundary will be severely skewed by the majority classes in an imbalanced classification. In this paper, we proposed a simple and effective approach to alleviate the unfavorable influence of imbalance problem by iteratively selecting a few unlabeled samples and adding them into the minority classes to form a balanced labeled dataset for the learning methods afterwards. The experiments on UCI datasets and MNIST handwritten digits dataset showed that the proposed approach outperforms other existing state-of-art methods.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2013arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

A Group Key Management Protocol Based on Weight-Balanced 2-3 Tree for Wireless Sensor Networks

Multicast in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an attractive mechanism for delivering data to multiple receivers as it saves bandwidth. To guarantee the security of multicast, the group key is used to encrypt and decrypt the packages. However, providing key management services in WSNs is complicated because sensor nodes possess limited resources of computing, storage and communication. To address the balance between security and limited resources, a multicast group key management protocol based on the weight-balanced 2-3 tree is proposed to generate, distribute, and update the group key securely and efficiently. The decentralized group key management method is employed. A weight-balanced 2-3 key tree is formed in every subgroup. Instead of using the conventional symmetric and non-symmetric encryption algorithms, the Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) code technique is used to distribute the multicast key dynamically. During the key updating, a series of adjustment rules are summarized to keep the tree weight-balanced, where pseudo-nodes as leaves are added to reduce the computation and communication complexity. Compared with some other group key management protocols, our scheme shows higher superiority on security and performance.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

A Localization Method for the Internet of Things

Many localization algorithms and systems have been developed by means of wireless sensor networks for both indoor and outdoor environments. To achieve higher localization accuracy, extra hardware equipments are utilized by most of the existing localization solutions, which increase the cost and considerably limit the location-based applications. The Internet of Things (IOT) integrates many technologies, such as Internet, Zigbee, Bluetooth, infrared, WiFi, GPRS, 3G, etc, which can enable different ways to obtain the location information of various objects. Location-based service is a primary service of the IOT, while localization accuracy is a key issue. In this paper, a higher accuracy localization scheme is proposed which can effectively satisfy diverse requirements for many indoor and outdoor location services. The proposed scheme composes of two phases: 1) partition phase, in which the target region is split into small grids; 2) localization refinement phase, in which a higher accuracy of localization can be obtained by applying an algorithm designed in the paper. A trial system is set up to verify correctness of the proposed scheme and furthermore to illustrate its feasibility and availability. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can improve the localization accuracy.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2011arXiv

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.

preprint2010arXiv

A Clustering-based Location Privacy Protection Scheme for Pervasive Computing

In pervasive computing environments, Location- Based Services (LBSs) are becoming increasingly important due to continuous advances in mobile networks and positioning technologies. Nevertheless, the wide deployment of LBSs can jeopardize the location privacy of mobile users. Consequently, providing safeguards for location privacy of mobile users against being attacked is an important research issue. In this paper a new scheme for safeguarding location privacy is proposed. Our approach supports location K-anonymity for a wide range of mobile users with their own desired anonymity levels by clustering. The whole area of all users is divided into clusters recursively in order to get the Minimum Bounding Rectangle (MBR). The exact location information of a user is replaced by his MBR. Privacy analysis shows that our approach can achieve high resilience to location privacy threats and provide more privacy than users expect. Complexity analysis shows clusters can be adjusted in real time as mobile users join or leave. Moreover, the clustering algorithms possess strong robustness.

preprint2010arXiv

A High-confidence Cyber-Physical Alarm System: Design and Implementation

Most traditional alarm systems cannot address security threats in a satisfactory manner. To alleviate this problem, we developed a high-confidence cyber-physical alarm system (CPAS), a new kind of alarm systems. This system establishes the connection of the Internet (i.e. TCP/IP) through GPRS/CDMA/3G. It achieves mutual communication control among terminal equipments, human machine interfaces and users by using the existing mobile communication network. The CPAS will enable the transformation in alarm mode from traditional one-way alarm to two-way alarm. The system has been successfully applied in practice. The results show that the CPAS could avoid false alarms and satisfy residents' security needs.

preprint2010arXiv

A Practical Localization Algorithm Based on Wireless Sensor Networks

Many localization algorithms and systems have been developed by means of wireless sensor networks for both indoor and outdoor environments. To achieve higher localization accuracy, extra hardware equipments are utilized by most of the existing localization algorithms, which increase the cost and greatly limit the range of location-based applications. In this paper we present a method which can effectively meet different localization accuracy requirements of most indoor and outdoor location services in realistic applications. Our algorithm is composed of two phases: partition phase, in which the target region is split into small grids and localization refinement phase in which a higher accuracy location can be generated by applying a trick algorithm. A realistic demo system using our algorithm has been developed to illustrate its feasibility and availability. The results show that our algorithm can improve the localization accuracy.

preprint2010arXiv

A Trust Model Based on Service Classification in Mobile Services

Internet of Things (IoT) and B3G/4G communication are promoting the pervasive mobile services with its advanced features. However, security problems are also baffled the development. This paper proposes a trust model to protect the user's security. The billing or trust operator works as an agent to provide a trust authentication for all the service providers. The services are classified by sensitive value calculation. With the value, the user's trustiness for corresponding service can be obtained. For decision, three trust regions are divided, which is referred to three ranks: high, medium and low. The trust region tells the customer, with his calculated trust value, which rank he has got and which authentication methods should be used for access. Authentication history and penalty are also involved with reasons.

preprint2010arXiv

An Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Communication Scheme for Body Sensor Networks

A high degree of reliability for critical data transmission is required in body sensor networks (BSNs). However, BSNs are usually vulnerable to channel impairments due to body fading effect and RF interference, which may potentially cause data transmission to be unreliable. In this paper, an adaptive and flexible fault-tolerant communication scheme for BSNs, namely AFTCS, is proposed. AFTCS adopts a channel bandwidth reservation strategy to provide reliable data transmission when channel impairments occur. In order to fulfill the reliability requirements of critical sensors, fault-tolerant priority and queue are employed to adaptively adjust the channel bandwidth allocation. Simulation results show that AFTCS can alleviate the effect of channel impairments, while yielding lower packet loss rate and latency for critical sensors at runtime.

preprint2010arXiv

Cyber-Physical Control over Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks with Packet Loss

There is a growing interest in design and implementation of cyber-physical control systems over wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). Thanks to the use of wireless communications and distributed architectures, these systems encompass many advantages as compared to traditional networked control systems using hard wirelines. While WSANs are enabling a new generation of control systems, they also introduce considerable challenges for quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. In this chapter we examine some of the major QoS challenges raised by WSANs, including resource constraints, platform heterogeneity, dynamic network topology, and mixed traffic. These challenges make it difficult to fulfill the requirements of cyber-physical control in terms of reliability and real-time. The focus of this chapter is on addressing the problem of network reliability. Specifically, we analyze the behavior of wireless channels via simulations based on a realistic link-layer model. Packet loss rate (PLR) is taken as a major metric for the analysis. The results confirm the unreliability of wireless communications and the uncertainty of packet loss over WSANs. To tackle packet loss, we present a simple solution that can take advantage of existing prediction algorithms. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of several classical prediction algorithms used for packet loss compensation. The results give some insights into how to deal with packet loss in cyber-physical control systems over unreliable WSANs.

preprint2010arXiv

Decentralized Inter-User Interference Suppression in Body Sensor Networks with Non-cooperative Game

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) provide continuous health monitoring and analysis of physiological parameters. A high degree of Quality-of-Service (QoS) for BSN is extremely required. Inter-user interference is introduced by the simultaneous communication of BSNs congregating in the same area. In this paper, a decentralized inter-user interference suppression algorithm for BSN, namely DISG, is proposed. Each BSN measures the SINR from other BSNs and then adaptively selects the suitable channel and transmission power. By utilizing non-cooperative game theory and no regret learning algorithm, DISG provides an adaptive inter-user interference suppression strategy. The correctness and effectiveness of DISG is theoretically proved, and the experimental results show that DISG can reduce the effect of inter-user interference effectively.

preprint2010arXiv

Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Smart Homes

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become indispensable to the realization of smart homes. The objective of this paper is to develop such a WSN that can be used to construct smart home systems. The focus is on the design and implementation of the wireless sensor node and the coordinator based on ZigBee technology. A monitoring system is built by taking advantage of the GPRS network. To support multi-hop communications, an improved routing algorithm based on the Dijkstra algorithm is presented. Preliminary simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.

preprint2010arXiv

Dynamical Jumping Real-Time Fault-Tolerant Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In time-critical wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, a high degree of reliability is commonly required. A dynamical jumping real-time fault-tolerant routing protocol (DMRF) is proposed in this paper. Each node utilizes the remaining transmission time of the data packets and the state of the forwarding candidate node set to dynamically choose the next hop. Once node failure, network congestion or void region occurs, the transmission mode will switch to jumping transmission mode, which can reduce the transmission time delay, guaranteeing the data packets to be sent to the destination node within the specified time limit. By using feedback mechanism, each node dynamically adjusts the jumping probabilities to increase the ratio of successful transmission. Simulation results show that DMRF can not only efficiently reduce the effects of failure nodes, congestion and void region, but also yield higher ratio of successful transmission, smaller transmission delay and reduced number of control packets.

preprint2010arXiv

iCare: A Mobile Health Monitoring System for the Elderly

This paper describes a mobile health monitoring system called iCare for the elderly. We use wireless body sensors and smart phones to monitor the wellbeing of the elderly. It can offer remote monitoring for the elderly anytime anywhere and provide tailored services for each person based on their personal health condition. When detecting an emergency, the smart phone will automatically alert pre-assigned people who could be the old people's family and friends, and call the ambulance of the emergency centre. It also acts as the personal health information system and the medical guidance which offers one communication platform and the medical knowledge database so that the family and friends of the served people can cooperate with doctors to take care of him/her. The system also features some unique functions that cater to the living demands of the elderly, including regular reminder, quick alarm, medical guidance, etc. iCare is not only a real-time health monitoring system for the elderly, but also a living assistant which can make their lives more convenient and comfortable.

preprint2010arXiv

iZone: A Location-Based Mobile Social Networking System

The rapid development of wireless technology, the extensive use of mobile phones and the availability of location information are facilitating personalized location-based applications. Easy to carry, easy to use and easy to buy, smart phones with certain software are of great advantage. Consequently, mobile social networking (MSN) systems have emerged rapidly, being a revolution for our everyday life. Based on the analysis of general requirements of MSN and location-based services (LBS), this paper presents the design of iZone, a mobile social networking system, as well as a prototype implementation. This platform exploits mobile GIS (Geographic Information Systems), LBS and J2ME technologies, combining geographical data to display map on mobile phones. It can provide a number of social networking services via smartphones.

preprint2010arXiv

Leakage-Aware Reallocation for Periodic Real-Time Tasks on Multicore Processors

It is an increasingly important issue to reduce the energy consumption of computing systems. In this paper, we consider partition based energy-aware scheduling of periodic real-time tasks on multicore processors. The scheduling exploits dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) and core sleep scheduling to reduce both dynamic and leakage energy consumption. If the overhead of core state switching is non-negligible, however, the performance of this scheduling strategy in terms of energy efficiency might degrade. To achieve further energy saving, we extend the static task scheduling with run-time task reallocation. The basic idea is to aggregate idle time among cores so that as many cores as possible could be put into sleep in a way that the overall energy consumption is reduced. Simulation results show that the proposed approach results in up to 20% energy saving over traditional leakage-aware DVS.

preprint2010arXiv

Localization Technologies for Indoor Human Tracking

The proliferation of wireless localization technologies provides a promising future for serving human beings in indoor scenarios. Their applications include real-time tracking, activity recognition, health care, navigation, emergence detection, and target-of-interest monitoring, among others. Additionally, indoor localization technologies address the inefficiency of GPS (Global Positioning System) inside buildings. Since people spend most of their time in indoor environments, indoor tracking service is in great public demand. Based on this observation, this paper aims to provide a better understanding of state-of-the-art technologies and stimulate new research efforts in this field. For these purposes, existing localization technologies that can be used for tracking individuals in indoor environments are reviewed, along with some further discussions.

preprint2010arXiv

R-CA: A Routing-based Dynamic Channel Assignment Algorithm for Wireless Mesh Networks

Even though channel assignment has been studied for years, the performance of most IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop wireless networks such as wireless sensor network (WSN), wireless mesh network (WMN), mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is limited by channel interference. Properly assigning orthogonal channels to wireless links can improve the throughput of multi-hop networks. To solve the dynamic channel assignment problem, a routing-based channel assignment algorithm called R-CA is proposed. R-CA can allocate channels for wireless nodes when needed and free channels after data transmission. Thus more channel resource can be explored by wireless nodes. Simulation results show that R-CA can effectively enhance the network throughput and packet delivery rate.