Abstract
Goal of pervasive computing is to prompt a thorough integration on information processing into everyday objects and activities of human beings. With recent advances and mature techniques in both software and hardware of sensor development, making a plethora of embedded platforms that equip well computation, communication, and sensing capabilities available has brought rich experiences to end users. The phenomenon indeed reveals dramatic changes on the way we live, we act, we think, and so forth which all directly are linked to our daily lives. That is, we have been, or thought to be, tightly integrated (and linked as well) with these amazing and small things around us. Taking the growing usage of smartphone, for instance, you may easily find that modern smartphones are equipped with a variety of sensors that can be applied to continuously monitor activities (e.g., behaviors), associated geographical information, services, and so on. In addition to those frequently-accessed devices, a rapidly-growing number of sensors (e.g., sensors on/in public facilities services or similar devices) around us also makes it possible to gain understanding of users in the real living world of human beings. As a summary of above-mentioned concerns in this promising area of study, the term “pervasive sensing” identifies, in essence, a promising momentum that incorporates different techniques, approaches, and thoughts in a hybrid realm of pervasive computing and ubiquitous sensing so as to overcome individual limitations and achieve synergistic effects.
This special issue received around many submissions from nine countries where the corresponding authors were majorly counted by the deadline for paper submission. All these submissions were considered significant in the area of pervasive sensing; but, however, only two-thirds of them passed the first-round examination which is based on a strict and rigorous review policy. After a two-round review process, sixteen papers were accepted for being included in this issue. These accepted papers mainly look at our issue from the perspectives of smart sensors, wireless sensor networking, sensor data management, data stream processing, RFID, embedded systems, distributed processing, artificial intelligence, agent theory, speech recognition, image and video analysis, signal processing, computational intelligence, machine learning, data and text mining, information retrieval, gesture recognition, biometrics, text-to-speech processing, software engineering, and their union, which lively brought discussions to the public.
“Intelligent supply chain integration and management based on cloud of things” by J. Yan et al. addresses the importance of the integration of intelligence for supply chain management and further provision of seamless services to end users in open and federated warehouses. Authors propose a new idea in the realm of cloud of things so as to develop flexible and agile approaches for facilitating the resource sharing and participant collaboration in lifecycles of supply chains. Convergence of intelligent supply chain condition perception, heterogeneous network access convergence, and resource servicisation are also demonstrated in a real-world system.
“Service-oriented node scheduling schemes with energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks” by H. Cheng et al. focuses on the essence of wireless sensor network, which looks at the issue of energy-efficient service provision via advantages of data sensing. The node scheduling problem is particularly discussed for the construction of the service-oriented wireless sensor network. A new framework, named energy-aware centralized heuristic scheme (ECHS), where an energy-aware benefit algorithm is applied for the determination of active sensor nodes and rotate sensor nodes by periodically reconstructing the scheduling scheme, was first introduced. Following the similar consideration, an energy-aware distributed heuristic scheme (EDHS) which serves as the distributed version of ECHS was presented to provide preliminary solutions to the real-world problems.
“Investigating how user's activities in both virtual and physical world impact each other leveraging LBSN data” by Z. Yu et al. discusses the impact of user activities, such as their online behavior (e.g., social relationship) and offline activities, on other correlated users by leveraging the data widely collected from location-based social networks. The graph theory is applied to represent the nodes (e.g., participants) and attributes of nodes such as popularity entropy and correlated impacts. A series of algorithms are defined to formulize the applied graph and further discover this implicit information among the graphs. With the results, link prediction is conducted for the comparison with other similar works and brings about the experiences to the real-world social-based applications and services.
“Intrusion-tolerant Jini service architecture for integrating security and survivability support in DSN” by S.-K. Kim et al. discusses a challenging issue on reliability of connections applied in distributed sensor works for the provision of ubiquitous services. An intrusion-tolerant Jini service architecture was proposed to integrate security and survivability support and provide end users with associated services. This architecture is expected to protect developed services not only from ordinary faults on network partitioning or server crash but also from unexpected attached exploiting flaws. The performance reaches a significant growth compared with other similar works in the area and is considered better to support seamless service usage in the ubiquitous environment.
“A signature-based data security technique for energy-efficient data aggregation in wireless sensor networks” by M. Yoon et al. discusses the issue of data aggregation in wireless sensor network. A signature-based data security technique is proposed for protecting sensitive data aggregation. This technique adopts additive property of complex numbers, between targeted node and its neighborhood nodes, to support privacy-preserving data aggregation and integrity checking. A real-world performance evaluation of proposed technique outperforms the existing techniques up to 50% in terms of communication and computation overheads and significantly reduces the integrity checking and data propagation delay.
“Community vitality in dynamic temporal networks” by F. Cai et al. discusses an emerging issue on construction of temporal networks over existing community structure. Authors propose the concept of community vitality that shows a community's life intensity on a time slice. The lifecycle, from its birth, maturing, and death, of the community vitality is defined as a self-regular computational process. The expected use scenarios of the community vitality are also addressed to help users understand or model the community evolution.
“Developing a mobile learning system in augmented reality context” by D.-R. Chen et al. focuses on the sensing techniques towards well assistance of ubiquitous learning environment. Authors point out the use of augmented reality technology to create virtual objects for use in mobile devices to create a context-aware and AR-enabled guided tour application for ubiquitous learning with a fundamental goal on providing users with a friendly, highly-interactive interface and rich, engaging media to stimulate intrinsic motivation and performance.
“A study of smart power control algorithm using RF communication in smart home environment” by S.-H. Shin et al. gives a comprehensive glance on the existing power control algorithms for the development of smart home environment using sensor techniques, the performance comparison, use scenarios, and advantages of them. In addition, essential solutions that foster the improvement of these existing algorithms are provided. This study implements the smart power control system using standby power and RF communication, among smart home technologies through the use of a current booster, an AC/DC converter, and a DC/DC converter to operate electric lights.
“A smart service model based on ubiquitous sensor networks using vertical farm ontology” by S. Sivamani et al. then considers a promising application of agriculture using sensing techniques. This study initializes a conceptual framework named vertical farm ontology, and an OWL-based ontology model that supports the topology understanding is defined. This model can recompose the information widely collected from the Internet or sensors and share essential information with other connected (or federated) systems. The result, for the sake of agriculture, is expected to pave great path for the development of smart and intelligent agricultural services.
“A novel mechanism for fire detection in subway transportation systems based on wireless sensor networks” by Z.-J. Zhang et al. raises an interesting research issue in regard to fire, which is considered a common and disastrous phenomenon in transportation system, especially in a closed environment (e.g., subway system) with large passenger flow. This paper proposes a new algorithm that concentrates on the alternative of data fusion via existing wireless sensor networks. It utilizes the quantity information and distribution of collected data so as to make prediction of fire incidents.
“Performance evaluation of page migration scheme for NVRAM-based wireless sensor nodes” by Y. Ryu comes back to the energy issue and tends to solve the low-powered and multifunctional sensor node(s) in an open wireless sensor network. A buffer management scheme for hybrid main memory, which combines low-power nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) and DRAM to reduce the energy consumption in a sensor node, is discussed. The proposed scheme employs the page migration technique in order to reduce the write operations on NVRAM part of hybrid main memory. The real-world experiment results outperform the legacy buffer management schemes in terms of the number of write operations on NVRAM.
“Human-robot interaction learning using demonstration- based learning and Q-learning in a pervasive sensing environment” by Y. Sung et al. then considers the machine learning-based human-computer interaction in a pervasive sensing environment. In essence, a novel interaction learning approach based on a virtual environment is defined in which the motor primitives are defined by manipulating a robot directly using demonstration-based learning. Through the proposed approach, a robot is expected to apply Q-learning to learn interactions with humans, and an enhanced performance is obtained compared with other similar works.
“Privacy protection based secure data transaction protocol for smart sensor meter in smart grid” by W. Go et al. goes into the issue of security and privacy for smart sensor meter in smart grid. Authors propose a privacy-enhanced secure data transaction protocol that can protect private data through real-time encryption that applies the user identity, home appliance serial number, and electricity consumption, so as to prevent attackers to obtain important data from the encrypted data. And also, unauthorized power companies cannot access this information either.
“An efficient cluster authentication scheme based on VANET environment in M2M application” by Y.-B. Jeon et al. discusses the authentication issue from the viewpoint of M2M application in VANET (vehicular ad hoc network) environment. Authors propose a cluster authentication scheme that mutually authenticates vehicles by composing vehicle movement as cluster configuration architecture. This scheme has successfully included the establishment of secure channels, the detection of replay attacks, mutual cluster authentication, and prevention of vehicle identity fabrication and secured distribution of provisional session key.
“Integrated validation system for the simulation of diverse sensors in WSNs” by H.-W. Kim and Y.-S. Jeong investigates the validation problem to a growing number of diverse sensors in wireless sensor networks. Authors propose diverse sensor definable simulators for the performance of experiments on diverse sensors with different communication distances in open wireless sensor network environments where geography markup language based coordinates are utilized. The primary goal is to provide flexibility to those existing simulators which are tailored to certain sensor characteristics.
“A sensor positioning scheme with high accuracy in nonuniform wireless sensor networks” by J. Park et al. then goes deeply to discuss the performance on accuracy in a nonuniform wireless sensor network environment. A novel sensor positioning scheme in nonuniform wireless sensor networks is first introduced and defined as a solution. As a result, it is applied to ensure the high accuracy of sensor positioning, and its superiority is demonstrated through a comprehensive comparison with the existing scheme such as DV-based position scheme.
The era of pervasive sensor network has begun, which promises to enhance the awareness of the cyber, physical, and social contexts and thus provide essential supports, in forms of services, applications, and so forth, to our daily lives. With the success in the organization of this special issue, it becomes possible for researchers (and interesting readers as well) who have been engaged in this emerging direction or related areas to receive state-of-the-art information, gain experiences, and further bring about the benefits in this promising area of study. We, the guest editors, also envision that the advanced stimulation of development of innovative services and solutions in pervasive sensing technology can be achieved in the coming future.