Matt Stabeler

Met with Graeme, Paddy and Simon regarding a request for a submission to the IJHCR journal – from the pervasive LBR – Basadaeir paper

http://www.igi-global.com/ijhcr

We decided that even though its not directly related my research, it would be worth submitting, as we would all benefit from a journal publication, and this seems to be fairly low bar….

My job is to manage this project, and let paddy/simon/graeme know what they need to do – Paddy said he might even write something.

Graeme and I went through the basic structure of the project, and came up with some initial ideas.

The project will have to be re-worked quite substantially, and might need to be coded from scratch. I have some concerns about whether this is worth doing if it’s not going to be part of my research. Will discuss with Paddy tomorrow.

JP MS

We talked about where we are going with the project,I suggested 5 actions:

JP:

• Write a project overview about his view on the project, print it out and keep it handy.
• Write a pseudocode algorithm about how to implement routing protocol
• Evaluate network simulators – NS2 & NS3

MS:

• Send papers to JP – Spray and Wait, Bubble RAP, Traffic Gossip
• Arrange Meeting with Olga/Neil

Both

• Arrange meeting with paddy

JP wants to work with the actual implementation, rather than just simulation, which is what I would choose too.

I have taken on mentorship of an ODCSSS project which we have dubbed – CitySense. My student, John Paul Meaney, is currently working on plugging in movement models to TOSSIM and Tiny OS – and also implementing simple DTN protocols. We have chosen TinyOS and TOSSIM so that we are able to easily test this in the real world, to compare data with simulation data.

Met with Davide at the whiteboard on the 3rd floor lobby to discuss and mini-project for me to do.

In the context of mobile sensor nodes, he would like to discover if we can reduce the overall total of Neighbors nodes (i.e. the sum over all nodes, of the number of neigbors each node has)

E = SUM(0 to n: total neigbors)

Construct a lattice of size L2 with N nodes, Each node may only move along the lines of the lattice, each costing 1.

Time is discreet, at intervals 1,2,3 … n etc. and

at each time step,

a node at random is picked,

if the node has less than or equal to C neighbors, then it picks one of the four surrounding points, and if that point is empty, it moves to that point, else it stays where it is.

else if the node has a value greater than C neighbours, it will pick a a diagonal position (2 hops) at random, and if it is not occupied, it will move, else it will stay where it is.

(Nodes will not bounce off the side of the lattice, but will continue to the other side.)

We will measure the value of E over T (time), and also the cost of movements.

T is not the timesteps, but each discreet value of T is the next step when each node has on average had the chance to move once (i.e. T is when t equals the number of nodes)

The overall effect should be to reduce density, speedily, as when there are too many neighbors, movement is ‘faster’ i.e. more hops.

The idea is to simulate this to generate some nice graphs

Today I met with Simon and his subgroup, to which I have become an adopted member, to get some feedback about my PhD direction.

I had previously met them and gave a 25 word overview of my PhD topic. At that time they were very helpful in giving feedback about the viability of my topic, and we suggested that at the next meeting we would talk in more detail about myself and Olga’s research.

At this meeting, I gave an overview that I was interesting in researching what the combination of social networks, and personal devices, to create a Delay Tolerant Network technique that uses the properties, facets and behaviours of human networks and mobility to send messages. With a view to using this network for metropolitan area environmental sensing.

I described my thoughts that we are reliant upon a infrastructure for our networking needs today, but there are various costs to this. To the user, to the providor, and perhaps to the environment. I gave some rough calculations as to the cost of deploying 1000 motes for a year which based their reporting communications on 3G networking, and whilst an individaul mote only used approx 240kb per day of bandwidth, this equated to 85GB per year, at a roughly estimated cost of 42,000 euros per year.

I said that I felt it is feasible to deploy some other mechanism for comunications that utilises the power in our pockets. I asked for confirmation that this was a valid topic, and that there was enough scope for research in this to make it a valid topic.

The general feeling was that there were some novelties in this, and Davide (Cellai) gave a very good explanation of similar problems in nature (Protein Interaction Networks) and felt that the science was in finding a way to describe such dynamic networks, and that there was allready a lot of research in static networks, but not in these dynamic ones.

Point 1: There is no formal language to describe dynamic networks/ the dynamics of networks

Question 1: How do you descibe how a network is evolving?

Question 2: What parameters do you need/have to describe?

Cosideration 1:  Failure models

Simon pointed out that this type of research is validated by NASA who are looking for ways to use DTN in swarm based autonomous missions to mars/space. Whilst this is not directly related (due to a lack of social networks), the ideas can still be used.

Davide also pointed out that in his and Graeme’s research, they have identified that mobility models provide a structure to, and therefore affect, dynamic networks, and that there is an area of research in this space. (which confirms my previous thoughts and efforts towards generating a reliable mobility model)

Met with Lorcan to talk about how i’m getting on with my PhD. I explained that I was a little unsure about the direction of my PhD.

I also told him about the papers I am writing – the first, a paper about Basadaeir for Pervasive LBR, deadline 27th Jan. I explained that the user study will be for developers to test out the API and comment on it, and the concept of the system.

The second paper, with ross is to do with pervasive advertising, and using Basadaeir as the context server for advertisments. Deadline 10th Feb.

Lorcan suggested that whilst it is a good idea to get something published about Basadaeir, I should not put too much effort into it, unless it will help my PhD out.

He suggested that I take a look at a few survery papers in my area, pick out the challenges, and write them down, then, from this list pick one or two, and write briefly how they might be solved, and come back to him.

Also, met Paddy and Simon in the corridor and asked them to take a look at my idea for my PhD Transfer Symposium Talk, they seemed to think it’s a workable idea, and I need to work it up into a presentation.

I mentioned that I would have liked to have read more around the subject, and I will do, but Paddy said that its more important that I show what I have read, for example, alot about context aware systems, that fits into this idea – as it is context-aware routing.

Also showed paddy my ideas for short term research projects, and he thinks the WaveLAN one might be interesting.

This mornning was the construct seminar in CASL, where bashed out some ideas about the future of construct:

The speakers were:

Graham Stevenson, Graham Williamson, Stephen Knox, Adrian Clear, Matt Stabeler (presentation), Suki, Donal Simmie, Erica (Juan Ye), Susan McKeever and Simon Dobson. Others present were Paddy Nixon, Ross Shannon, Wei Zhou, Lorcan Coyle among others….

We talked about a number of things, and whilst we didn’t have conclusions, we came up with some thing to think about:

• Mobile / Lighweight
• Multiple Distribution protocols / modules
• Multiple inferencing modules
• Justification for te RDF models we use
• Construct Need and end goal
• It needs an Application Showcase to show off to potential users / developers

Met with John Curran and Fred Clarke regarding using logs from the wireless access points

The data available for WaveLAN is building level DHCP leases, but not AP level information, this is available to us, as it is pretty much anonymous.

The data available from the Eduroam system is more detailed an includes authentication information, access point details etc. we would need to discuss how we would anonymise this data before we could use it.

Neil O’Reilly would be able to give use a sample of the logs for the wavelan network, so we could see what information is available,

We need to send a doc to give the following:

who has access
how long we will keep it
how we would dispose of the data
e.g. assume this is personal data, how will we deal with it?

Brief meeting with paddy.

We both like the idea of the City wide sensing idea using mobile devices. I mentioned that Jo K had thought the whole routing thing had been done, but paddy suggested that there is different view on similar problems that still yield interesting research topics.

We discussed simulations, and I mentioned the idea of using some datasets from Dublin traffic, and maybe even the wireless access point data from UCD campus to simulate social networks.

Paddy mentioned an IBM city simulator that has since disappeared, but will see if he can find out more about it (I will too).

Going forward, I should have a project to get my teeth into, that has some proper research outcomes, which should be a shot term project – 3 months.

I will arrange a meeting with myself, Paddy, Aaron and Simon for sometime very soon to come up with ideas.

I should probably come up with some suggestions to work with, for what the project could be. *thinking cap on*