Biblio

In emergency situations like recent Australian bushfires, it is crucial for civilians and firefighters to receive critical information such as escape routes and safe sheltering points with guarantees on information quality attributes. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) can provide communications in bushfire when fixed infrastructure is destroyed and not available. Current MANET solutions, however, are mostly tested under static bushfire scenario. In this work, we investigate the impact of a realistic dynamic bushfire in a dry eucalypt forest with a shrubby understory, on the performance of data delivery solutions in a MANET. Simulation results show a significant degradation in the performance of state-of-the-art MANET quality of information solution. Other than frequent source handovers and reduced user usability, packet arrival latency increases by more than double in the 1st quartile with a median drop of 74.5 % in the overall packet delivery ratio. It is therefore crucial for MANET solutions to be thoroughly evaluated under realistic dynamic bushfire scenarios.

In this paper, the problem of misinformation propagation is studied for an Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) system in which an attacker seeks to inject false information in the IoBT nodes in order to compromise the IoBT operations. In the considered model, each IoBT node seeks to counter the misinformation attack by finding the optimal probability of accepting a given information that minimizes its cost at each time instant. The cost is expressed in terms of the quality of information received as well as the infection cost. The problem is formulated as a mean-field game with multiclass agents which is suitable to model a massive heterogeneous IoBT system. For this game, the mean-field equilibrium is characterized, and an algorithm based on the forward backward sweep method is proposed. Then, the finite IoBT case is considered, and the conditions of convergence of the equilibria in the finite case to the mean-field equilibrium are presented. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a two-fold increase in the quality of information (QoI) compared to the baseline when the nodes are always transmitting.

In this paper we present a framework for Quality of Information (QoI)-aware networking. QoI quantifies how useful a piece of information is for a given query or application. Herein, we present a general QoI model, as well as a specific example instantiation that carries throughout the rest of the paper. In this model, we focus on the tradeoffs between precision and accuracy. As a motivating example, we look at traffic video analysis. We present simple algorithms for deriving various traffic metrics from video, such as vehicle count and average speed. We implement these algorithms both on a desktop workstation and less-capable mobile device. We then show how QoI-awareness enables end devices to make intelligent decisions about how to process queries and form responses, such that huge bandwidth savings are realized.