CS 756: Mobile Computing and Sensor Networks, Fall '08

CS 756: Mobile Computing and Sensor Networks, Fall 2008

Tuesdays, 6pm-9pm, GITC 4515

Instructor

Cristian Borcea
Office: GITC 4303
Phone: 973 596-3662
Office Hours: TBD
email

Goals

Understand the principles, state-of-the-art solutions, and issues of mobile computing and sensor networks
Investigate novel ideas in these research areas in a semester-long design project
Find research topics for Ph.D. and M.S. theses as well as M.S projects

Short description

As mobile devices become ubiquitous, they will begin to serve purposes beyond email and browsing on the go. Smart phones, vehicular systems, home appliances, and environmental sensors can form heterogeneous mobile networks to provide a new class of distributed services that acquire, process, and disseminate real-time information from systems located in the proximity of people, places, or activities of interest. This course provides an in-depth study of mobile computing and sensor networks, which are becoming major components of the transition from today's world of desktop computers to a world where computing is ubiquitous. The main topics include: techniques to handle mobility in the Internet and ad hoc networks; operating systems, programming languages, and protocols for sensor networks; applications, middleware, programming models, and security for ubiquitous computing environments. This semester, the course will focus on mobile social computing and urban/people-centric sensor networks.

Who should take this course

You should take this class if you want to learn how the wireless revolution is (and will be) changing the way we live and interact with each other. Besides understanding mobile computing and sensor networks, you can find topics for Ph.D. and M.S. theses or M.S. projects. Additionally, the theoretical and practical knowledge acquired in this class can help you find very good jobs as we are witnessing a boom in the wireless/mobile computing industry and people with skills in these areas are rare.

Prerequisites

CS 656. Talk with me if you did not take CS 656: good background in operating systems, distributed systems, security, or programming languages may be acceptable. While this course is addressed to CS graduate students, you should contact me if you are from another department and have a strong interest in it.

Reading, presenting, and discussing research papers

There is no book required for this class. Each lecture is based on several research papers covering a specific topic. Every week, the instructor will briefly introduce the topic (the lecture slides will be posted before each class) and then will moderate the discussions of the assigned papers for that week. Students are required to read the papers before the class. Each student will lead the discussion for at least one paper during the semester (this involves preparing slides for that paper as well). The papers will be selected by the instructor from top conferences and journals.

Design project

This class does not have exams. The design project will be the main grading criteria. Students will form teams to design novel protocols, system architectures/mechanisms, or applications. The goal of this project is to identify interesting problems and propose sound solutions for these problems. Prototyping your design is highly recommended, but not required. The instructor will present several ideas for projects during the first class; however, you can propose your own ideas. We will have frequent design reviews in class: each team presents its ideas/progress and receives feedback from the entire class. There will be a major intermediate project presentation (mid-semester) and a final project presentation at the end of the semester. Additionally, each team will produce a final project report similar to a short research paper. For those teams that decide to prototype their designs, smart phones and sensors will be provided.

Grading

Intermediate project presentation - 25%
Final project presentation - 20%
Final project report - 15%
Research paper(s) presentation - 20%
Participation in class discussions - 20%

Schedule

Week	Topic	Readings
1	Introduction to mobile computing and sensor networks. Course overview. Project Ideas.
2	Mobility and the Internet.	S. Zhuang, K. Lai, I. Stoica, R. Katz, and S. Shenker, Host Mobility using an Internet Indirection Infrastructure, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2003. M. Satyanarayanan, M. Kozuch, C. Helfrich, and D. O'Hallaron Towards Seamless Mobility on Pervasive Hardware , Elsevier PMC 2005.
3	Mobile ad hoc networks.	V. Kawadia, Y. Zhang, and B. Gupta, System Services for Ad-Hoc Routing: Architecture, Implementation and Experiences, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2003. L., Li, E. Ramjee, M. Buddhikot, and S. Miller Network Coding-Based Broadcast in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, IEEE Infocom 2007.
4	Capacity and delay in mobile ad hoc networks.	M. Grossglauser and D. Tse, Mobility Increases the Capacity of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, IEEE/ACM TON 2003. G. Sharma, R. Mazumdar, and N. Shroff, Delay and Capacity Trade-Offs in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Global Perspective, IEEE/ACM TON 2006.
5	Mobile social computing.	C. Borcea, A. Gupta, A. Kalra, Q. Jones, and L. Iftode The MobiSoC Middleware for Mobile Social COmputing: Challenges, Design, and Early Experiences, Mobilware 2008. A. Miklas, K. Gollu, K. Chan, S. Saroiu, K. Gummadi, and E. de Lara, Exploiting Social Interactions in Mobile Systems, Ubicomp 2007
6	Sensor networks.	C. Ee, R. Fonseca, S. Kim, D. Moon, A. Tavakoli, D. Culler, S. Shenker, and I. Stoica, A Modular Network Layer for Sensornets, Usenix OSDI 2006. S. Kim, R. Fonseca, P. Dutta, A. Tavakoli, D. Culler, P. Levis, S. Shenker, and I. Stoica, Flush: A Reliable Bulk Transport Protocol for Multihop Wireless Networks, ACM SenSys 2007.
7	Urban/People-centric sensor networks.	O.Riva and C. Borcea, The Urbanet Revolution: Sensor Power to the People!, IEEE Pervasive Computing 2007. A. Campbell, S. Eisenman, N. Lane, E. Miluzzo, and R. Peterson, People-Centric Urban Sensing, WICON 2006.
8	Intermediate project presentation.
10	People-centric sensing on smart phones.	J. Froehlich, M. Chen, S. Consolvo, B. Harrison, and J. Landay, MyExperience: A System for In situ Tracing and Capturing of User Feedback on Mobile Phones, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2007. S. Gaonkar, J. Li, R. Choudhury, L. Cox, and A. Schmidth, Micro-Blog: Sharing and Querying Content through Mobile Phones and Social Participation, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2008.
10	Vehicular networks.	B. Hull, V. Bychkovsky, Y. Zhang, K. Chen, M. Goraczko, A. Miu, E. Shih, H. Balakrishnan, and S. Madden, CarTel: A Distributed Mobile Sensor Computing System, ACM SenSys 2006. U. Lee, E. Magistretti, M. Gerla, P. Bellavista, and A. Corradi, Dissemination and Harvesting of Urban Data using Vehicular Sensing Platforms, IEEE TVT 2008.
11	Power management on mobile devices.	M. Anand, E. Nightingale, and J. Flinn, Ghosts in the Machine: Interfaces for Better Power Management, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2004. Y. Agarwal, R. Chandra, A. Wolman, P. Bahl, K. Chin, and R. Gupta, Wireless Wakeups Revisited: Energy Management for VoIP over Wi-Fi Smartphones, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2007.
12	Privacy in mobile computing.	L. Cox, A. Dalton, and V. Marupadi, SmokeScreen: Flexible Privacy Controls for Presence-Sharing, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2007. C. Cornelius, A. Kapadia, D. Kotz, D. Peebles, M. Shin, and N. Triandopoulos, AnonySense: Privacy-Aware People-Centric Sensing, ACM/Usenix MobiSys 2008.
13	Programming mobile networks and sensor networks with mobile code.	P. Levis, D. Gay, and D. Culler, Active Sensor Networks, Usenix NSDI 2005. O. Riva, T. Nadeem, C. Borcea, and L. Iftode, Context-aware Migratory Services in Ad Hoc Networks, IEEE TMC 2007.
14	Final project presentation.

Honor Code

The NJIT Honor Code will be upheld, and any violations will be brought to the immediate attention of the Dean of Students.

Modifications to Syllabus

The students will be consulted and must agree to any modifications or deviations from the syllabus throughout the course of the semester.