OppSense: Information sharing for mobile phones in sensing field with data repositories

With the popularity and advancements of smart phones, mobile users can interact with the sensing facilities and exchange information with other wireless devices in the environment by short range communications. Opportunistic exchange has recently been suggested in similar contexts; yet we show strong evidence that, in our application, opportunistic exchange would lead to insufficient data availability and extremely high communication overheads due to inadequate or excessive human contacts in the environment. In this paper, we present OppSense, a novel design to provide efficient opportunistic information exchange for mobile phone users in sensing field with data repositories that tackles the fundamental availability and overhead issues. Our design differs from conventional opportunistic information exchange in that it can provide mobile phone users guaranteed opportunities for information exchange regardless the number of users and contacts in different environments. Through both analysis and simulations, we show that the deployment of data repositories plays a key role in the overall system optimization. We demonstrate that the placement of data repositories is equivalent to a connected K-coverage problem, and an elegant heuristic solution considering the mobility of users exists. We evaluate our proposed framework and algorithm with real mobile traces. Extensive simulations demonstrate that data repositories can effectively enhance the data availability up to 41% in low contact environment and significantly reduce the communication overheads to only 28% compared to opportunistic information exchange in high contact environment.