Complex Network Topologies (CNTs)–network holes and cuts–often occur in practical WSN deployments. Many researchers have acknowledged that CNTs adversely affect the performance of location-based routing and proposed various CNT- aware location-based routing protocols. However, although they aim to address practical issues caused by CNTs, many proposed protocols are either based on idealistic assumptions, require too much resources, or have poor performance. Additionally, proposed protocols are designed only for a single routing primitive–either unicast, multicast, or convergecast. However, as recent WSN applications require diverse traffic patterns, the need for an unified routing framework has ever increased. In this dissertation, we address these main weaknesses in the research on location- based routing. We first propose efficient algorithms for detecting and abstracting CNTs in the network. Using these algorithms, we present our CNT-aware location- based unicast routing protocol that achieves the guaranteed small path stretch with significantly reduced communication overhead. We then present our location-based multicast routing protocol that finds near optimal routing paths from a source node to multicast member nodes, with efficient mechanisms for controllable packet header size and energy-efficient recovery from packet losses. Our CNT-aware convergecast routing protocol improves the network lifetime by identifying network regions with concentrated network traffic and distributing the traffic by using the novel concept of virtual boundaries. Finally, we present the design and implementation details of our unified routing framework that seamlessly integrates proposed unicast, multicast, and convergecast routing protocols. Specifically, we discuss the issues regarding the implementation of our routing protocols on real hardware, and the design of the framework that significantly reduces the code and memory size to fit in a resource constrained sensor mote. We conclude with a proactive solution designed to cope with CNTs, where mobile nodes are used for “patching” CNTs to restore the network connectivity and to optimize the network performance.

No description available.

The proliferation of mobile devices has resulted in the creation of an unprecedented amount of context about their users. Furthermore, the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) has begun and it will bring with it even more context and the ability for users to effect their environment through digital means. Applications that exist in the IoT ecosystem must treat context as a first class citizen and use it to simplify what would otherwise be an unmanageable amount of information. This thesis proposes the use of context to build a new class of applications that are focused on enhancing normal human behaviour and moving complexity away from the user. We present Yakkit—a location based messaging application that allows users to communicate with others nearby. The use of context allows Yakkit to be used without the creation of a login or a profile and enhances the normal way one would interact in public. To make Yakkit work we explore different ways of modelling location context and application deployment through experimentation. We model location in an attempt to predict a user’s final destination based on their current position and the trajectories of past users. Finally, we experiment deploying the Yakkit service on different servers to observe the effect of distance on the message transit time of Yakkit messages. / Graduate / przemek@uvic.ca

Title: A study of how the Brick and Mortar business can utilize Location-based Marketing in Sweden. - Technologies, Strategies, Privacy & Integrity and Receptiveness from a consumer and expert perspective. Date: 2014-05-20 Level: Bachelor Thesis in Marketing Authors: Philip Lagström and Gustaf Stenlund. Supervisor: Klaus Solberg Søilen. Purpose: The purpose of this research is to create an understanding of what location-based marketing is and how brick and mortar businesses in Sweden can use this type of marketing, and how it affects sales and the customer experience. The objective is also to find out how consumers percept location-based marketing and possible privacy and integrity concerns. Theoretical framework: The theoretical framework begins with theory regarding Smartphone usage in Sweden and privacy & integrity concerns. The theory also discusses the brick and mortar business. Further, it discusses what kinds of techniques and methods that are used by location-based marketing today is, and how push and pull strategies can be used within location-based marketing. Method: The research is based on a combination of a qualitative and quantitative study. This was made to get the experts point of view and also the consumers’ perspective. The qualitative part consisted of three interviews with experts in the field of location-based marketing, mobile applications, Smartphone marketing and digital marketing. The quantitative part consisted of a survey with 357 participants Empirical framework: The empirical study consists of interviews and a survey. It begins with the interviews with the three experts; this part involves thoughts regarding location-based marketing within brick and mort, best method of LBM, consumer receptiveness, negative/positive aspects, privacy and integrity and future prospects for location-based marketing. This followed by the results from the quantitative survey with our 357 respondents; the survey gives a consumer point of view on important factors such as Smartphone use, consumer interest regarding LBM, receptiveness, privacy and integrity concerns and loyalty. Conclusion: The conclusion made in this dissertation is that location-based marketing is a great part of the digital marketing mix, and could potentially work well for Swedish brick and mortar businesses. It has potential to create increased value for consumers, which in turn can develop into a loyal customer base. The respondents of our survey are not concerned about their privacy and integrity. However, it could be a devastating blow for retailers if dealt with incorrectly.

In response to a growing recognition of the importance of spatial information, the concept of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) has evolved. Designed to facilitate an environment that promotes access and sharing of spatial information, SDI development has benefited from, and in due course adopted, advances in information technology (particularly improvements in desktop computing capabilities and communication networks such as the Internet). / The never ceasing progression of technology now enables communication and data access via mobile phones and a myriad of portable, networked computing devices. Indeed over the last few years, the proliferation of mobile phones has exceeded many expectations and is enabling nomadic users to communicate and access data services with ease. Location is one of the unique characteristics of mobility that is encompassed by this form of wireless communication and has been capitalised on in the form of enhanced safety initiatives. In turn, the infrastructure required for these safety services has encouraged additional Location Based Services (LBS) to flourish / LBS act as spatial decision making tools, providing information to end users based on their location, or on the location of some target. LBS are not restricted to the wireless environment however this is their current area of promotion. The principles of accessing spatial information that are encompassed by LBS mirror those of SDIs, and as a result SDI models need to accommodate for this new medium of information access and delivery. This research aimed to expand the SDI model to support applications that assist with spatial decision making, such as LBS. Focused specifically on LBS that are accessible for wirelessly networked, portable devices, this research implemented a theoretical and practical approach to identify the additional requirements for SDIs in this domain. A prototype LBS application for public transport information and navigation was developed and evaluated as part of this process. It is proposed that the resulting model (which details the additional requirements as well as their relative importance) act as an example framework for future LBS implementations so that they may gain the benefits from a standard, integrated infrastructure as offered by SDIs.

Thesis--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-60).

The popularity of location empowered devices such as GPS enabled smart-phones has immensely amplified the use of location-based services in social networks. This happened by allowing users to share Geo-tagged contents such as current locations/check-ins with their social network friends. These location-aware social networks are called Location-based Social Networks (LBSN), and examples include Foursquare and Gowalla. The data of LBSNs are being used for providing different kinds of services such as the recommendation of locations, friends, activities, and media contents, and the prediction of user's locations. To provide such services, different queries are utilized that exploit activity/check-in data of users. Usually, LBSN data is divided into two parts, a social graph that encapsulates the friendships of users and an activity graph that maintains the visit history of users at locations. Such a data separation is scalable enough for processing queries that directly utilize friendship information and visit history of users. These queries are called user and activity analytic queries. The visits of users at locations create relationships between those locations. Such relationships can be built on different features such as common visitors, geographical distance, and mutual location categories between them. The process of analysing such relationships for optimizing location-based services is termed Location Analytics. In location analytics, we expose the subjective nature of locations that can further be used for applications in the domain of prediction of visitors, traffic management, route planning, and targeted marketing.In this thesis, we provide a general LBSN data model which can support storage and processing of queries required for different applications, called location analytics queries. The LBSN data model we introduce, segregates the LBSN data into three graphs: the social graph, the activity graph, and the location graph. The location graph maintains the interactions of locations among each other. We define primitive queries for each of these graphs. In order to process an advanced query, we express it as a combination of these primitive queries and process them on corresponding graphs in parallel. We further provide a distributed data processing framework called GeoSocial-GraphX (GSG). GSG implements the aforementioned LBSN data model for efficient and scalable processing of the queries. We further exploit the location graph for providing novel location analytics queries in the domain of influence maximization and visitor prediction. We introduce a notion of location influence. Such influence can capture the interactions of locations based on their visitors and can be used for propagation of information between them. The applications of such a query lie in the domain of outdoor marketing, and simulation of virus and news propagation. We also provide a unified system IMaxer that can evaluate and compare different information propagation mechanisms. We further exploit the subjective nature of locations by analysing the mobility behaviour of their visitors. We use such information to predict the individual visitors as well as the groups of visitors (cohorts) in future for those locations. The prediction of visitors can be used for better event planning, traffic management, targeted marketing, and ride-sharing services.In order to evaluate the proposed frameworks and approaches, we utilize data from four real-life LBSNs: Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla, and Wee Places. The detailed LBSN data mining and statistically significant experimental evaluation results show the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of our proposed methods. Our proposed approaches can be employed in real systems for providing life-care services. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie / The portal is not showing my complete name. The name (my complete name), I want to have on the diploma is "Muhammad Aamir Saleem". Please correct this issue. / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

With the rapid growth of mobile, ubiquitous and wearable computing, location-based services become an indispensable part of mobile internet. These services rely on the geographical position of the mobile devices and provide location-dependent contents or services to users, such as location-based in- stant messaging, POI browsing, map navigation, and location-based virtual reality games. Most existing systems implement these location-based services by always storing and transmitting raw, plaintext GPS coordinates. However, location information is arguably a private asset of individual user, and the disclosure of such information could lead to severe privacy disclosure of other even more sensitive information, such as religion, sexuality, medical condition, or political affiliation. To address this issue, researchers have proposed a series of techniques to protect user location privacy against location-based service providers. How- ever, it is challenging to apply these theoretical and sophisticated techniques ii to practical location systems because of the computational or network over- head imposed on the mobile devices as well as the complexity of the secure protocols and algorithms for application developers. In this thesis, I will study two real-life privacy-preserving location systems and show how they can be adopted by developers with little security background. The rst is outdoor proximity detection that determines whether two users (or a user and an ob- ject) are within a given distance threshold. This is a fundamental service in many geo-social or map services. For example, \People nearby" in Wechat and QQ interconnect users because of their locality and/or mutual interests in some topics, such as food and movies. The second is indoor location mon- itoring and tracking. Wearable devices such as smart watch and bracelets continually broadcast Bluetooth Low Energy signals, which can be easily cap- tured by monitoring devices such as WiFi routers and Bluetooth scanners. As more and more wearable devices emerge, unauthorized monitoring and track- ing by adversary becomes great privacy threats not only in the cyberworld, but also in the physical world. To protect location privacy, I develop a real- life location monitoring system that is based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) privacy feature that changes the device physical address periodically. To en- able users to better control their privacy level while still providing monitoring and tracking service to authorized parties (e.g., for child and elderly care), I extend BLE privacy by enriching its privacy semantics with a comprehensive set of metrics, such as simple opt-in/out, k-anonymity, and granularity-based anonymity. Both systems have been posted online and evaluated in terms of accuracy and user study.

People with vision impairment have various challenges in wayfinding, navigation, and crossing signalized intersections. They often face physical and information barriers that impede their mobility and undermine their safety along a trip. Visually impaired people usually use a white cane as their primary aid when crossing urban traffic intersections. In order to improve their mobility, safety and accessibility, it is important to provide an assistive system to help them in intersection navigation and to provide information regarding the surrounding environment. While assistive systems have been developed to help visually impaired pedestrians to navigate and find their way, using these systems may be inconvenient. Furthermore, none of the currently available systems provide communication between the users and traffic signal controller that can help them request pedestrian crossing signal timing. Emerging connected vehicle technologies can provide a solution to assist visually impaired people and address their challenges. Conflicts between vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs) often result in injuries and fatalities. A situational awareness system could be based on wireless communications between vehicles and VRUs for the exchange of situational awareness information. Compared to the radar-based and vision-based systems, the wireless-based system. can improve VRUs’ safety, especially in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) situations. In particular, it can be very helpful when drivers are making a right or left turn where there is a pedestrian in a crosswalk and visibility conditions are poor. The Smart Walk Assistant (SWA) system was designed, developed, and tested during the research of this dissertation. It includes two wireless communication pathways; pedestrian-to-infrastructure (P2I) and pedestrian-to-vehicle (P2V). The first communication pathway enables users to send a pedestrian signal request to the traffic signal controller and receive traffic signal status. The second communication pathway enables pedestrians and vehicles to exchange information, including location, speed, and heading, that can be used to detect possible conflict between pedestrian and vehicles and provide conflict alerts. The SWA system may be especially beneficial to pedestrians with disability (e.g., blind or visually impaired pedestrians) who would benefit from active support to safely cross streets at signalized intersections. Developing a reliable situational awareness system for pedestrians is much more challenging than for vehicles because a vehicle’s movement is more predictable and usually remains in the lane in the road. In order to provide better location-based services for pedestrians, a position accuracy is needed of, at most, the width of a crosswalk or sidewalk. The SWA system includes a method to estimate a pedestrian’s position. The algorithm is based on integrating Map-Matching and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) in a connected vehicle environment to provide precise location information. The system architecture for the SWA application was developed to be applicable for both a simulation environment and a real world traffic system. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation environment is developed and calibrated to mimic the real world. Comprehensive testing and assessment of the system and algorithms are conducted in simulation as well as field test networks.

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) has created the opportunity to transact anywhere, anytime, transcending barriers of space and time. However, this freedom has been found to be intrusive in the lives of mobile users, acting counterproductively to trust building and exacerbating the reluctance to adopt m-commerce. The research design was a quantitative study that pivoted around the concept of location-based services (LBS) for mobile users and was focused on understanding specific behaviours around usage and trust under pre-determined conditions of connecting (particular place, particular time), push and pull mechanisms, brand loyalty and social network recommendations. The study was conducted through an online questionnaire with a non-probability sample of 189 individuals. Factors including push and pull LBS mechanisms, brand loyalty and social network recommendations were found to exhibit significant influence on mobile users trust and propensity to transact in m-commerce. No empirical support was found between the connecting conditions with mobile users and adoption of m-commerce, eliciting future research in this area. These results contribute to the body of research regarding mobile commerce by extending the existing understanding of its use through application with push and pull location-based services. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted