Bubble sensing

Chapter 1
Introduction

Bubble sensing is the new paradigm for binding a sensing task to the physical world
using mobile phones. Since mobile phones have the all features of sensor nodes we can
form sensor network of mobile phones.

1.1 Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Sensor Network are the wireless networks consisting of spatially
distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as
temperature, sound vibration pressure motion or pollutants and to cooperatively pass the
data through the network to a main location. It consists of sensor nodes containing
battery, processor, communication device, sensor etc. that is capable of performing some
processing, gathering sensory information and communicating with other connected
nodes in the network.

1.2 Mobile phones and its usage

A mobile phone is an electronic device used to make mobile telephone calls across a
wide geographic area. A mobile phone can make and receive telephone calls to and from
the public telephone network which includes other mobiles and fixed-line phones across
the world. It does this by connecting to a cellular network owned by a mobile network
operator. In addition to being a telephone, modern mobile phones also support many
additional services, and accessories, such as SMS (or text) messages, e-
mail, Internet access, gaming Bluetooth and infrared short range wireless communication,
camera, MMS messaging, MP3 player, radio and GPS.

The mobile phone has become a ubiquitous tool for communications, computing,
and increasingly, sensing. More than three billions of people are using mobile phones all
around the world. Many mobile phone and PDA models (e.g., Nokia's N95 and 5500

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Sport, Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, and Sony Ericsson's W580 and W910)
commercially released over the past couple years have integrated sensors (e.g.,
accelerometer, camera, microphone) that can be accessed programmatically, or support
access to external sensor modules connected via Bluetooth.

1.3 Mobile phones as sensor nodes

The basic components of sensor nodes are battery, sensors, processor, transceiver,
localization device. Mobile phones has sensors like camera and microphone, it can act as
transceiver, also it has battery, localization facility like GPS. Since mobile phones have
all the basic components of sensor nodes we can consider mobile phones as sensor nodes.
If the right architecture is given to mobile phones, they can act as sensor nodes and we
can build the sensor network of mobile phones.

1.4 Sensor network of mobile phones

Since mobile phones acts as sensor nodes, here we present the bubble-sensing system
which is one of the special architecture which supports the sensor network of mobile
phones. Bubble sensing is one of the sensor network architecture that allows mobile
phone users to create a binding between tasks and the physical world at the locations of
interest that remains active for a duration set by the user. This architecture will support
the persistent sensing of a particular location, as required by user requests. Conceptually,
a user with a phone that has opted into the bubble-sensing system visits a location of
interest, presses a button on his phone to affix the sensing request to the location, and
then walks away. The sensing request persists at the location until the timeout set by the
initiator is reached. This mechanism can be viewed as an application in its own right and
as a persistent sensing building block for other applications. A number of compelling use
cases can be envisioned.

Sensing bubbles can be used for people to more easily self-organize and collect
the proof they need to demonstrate some problem with their community. Such proof is

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often required before the appropriate authorities will take action. A bubble could be
established near a school to prove that traffic speeds are dangerous and changes to the
road design are required (e.g., traffic calming measures such as speed bumps). Or a
bubble could be established near a factory to monitor pollution levels. By applying the
sensing bubble approach people can participate in such initiatives simply by activating an
application on their phone. This lowers the burden of participation increasing the
likelihood people will become involved.

Recreational communities of joggers, orienteer’s, and cyclists are increasingly

forming groups within which they share information about routes, conditions and
performance. Many of these people use sensing systems during these forms of recreation.
An ad hoc series of sensing bubbles could be established by members of these
communities along these routes so they could monitor the conditions on their favorites or
those they are interested in trying out soon. Sensing bubbles could be used to monitor
locations that people want to come back to once current conditions have changed. For
instance they may go to a restaurant and find it is too busy, or go to a night club and find
that it is not yet very busy. It is common to leave the location and come back once the
desired circumstances have been reached. In these cases a person could leave a sensing
bubble about a club and then be notified when the sound volume suggests that it is busy,
or the reverse in the case of the restaurant (in which case the person wants to return when
the place is less busy). They are then free to go shopping or for a walk and be able to
return only once things are to their liking.

While the notion of virtually affixing sensor tasks to locations is appealing, it

requires some work to implement this service on top of a cloud of human-carried phone
based sensors. First, since the mobility of the phones is uncontrolled, there is no
guarantee that sensors will be well placed to sample the desired location specified by the
sensing task. Further, there is the issue of communicating the sensing task to potential
sensors when they are well-positioned. This is made more difficult when, either due to
hardware or user policy limitations, an always-on cellular link and localization
capabilities are not available on all phones. Wireless data access via EDGE, 3G, or open
WiFi infrastructure is increasingly available, as is localization service via on-board GPS,

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WiFi, or cellular-tower triangulation. However, currently, only a subset of mobile phones
on the market have GPS and WiFi, and even when devices have all the required
capabilities, users may disable the GPS and or limit data upload via WiFi and cellular
data channels to manage privacy, energy consumption, and monetary cost.

Though the mobility in a people-centric sensor network is not controllable, it is

also not random. In an urban sensing scenario, the visited areas of interest for one person
are likely to be visited by many others (e.g., street corners, bus/subway stations, schools,
restaurants, night clubs, etc.). Imagine a heterogeneous system where users are willing to
share resources and data and to fulfill sensing tasks. Therefore, the bubble-sensing system
opportunistically leverages other mobile phones as they pass by on behalf of a sensing
task initiator. Here adopting a two tier hardware architecture comprising the bubble
server on the backend; and sensor-enabled mobile phones that can initiate sensing
bubbles, maintain sensing bubbles in the designated location, replace bubbles that
disappear due to phone mobility, enact the sampling as indicated by the sensing bubble,
and report the sensed data back to the bubble server. Mobile phones participating in the
bubble-sensing system take on one or more roles depending on their mobility
characteristics, hardware capabilities, and user profiles.

The bubble creator is the device whose user initiates the sensing request that leads
to the creation of the sensing bubble. The bubble anchor keeps the bubble in the region of
interest by broadcasting the sensing request. The sensing node perceives the bubble by
listening to the broadcasts, takes samples within the area of interest according to the
sensing request, and then uploads the results to the bubble server. The bubble carrier can
help to restore a bubble if all bubble anchors are lost. The bubble server binds the results
to the bubble, which can be queried by the bubble creator at any time. Bubble-sensing
system is implemented by using Nokia N95 mobile phones. In the section 2 the detail
description of the bubble sensing architecture is clearly mentioned. In section 3 the
implementation details are mentioned.

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Chapter 2

Bubble sensing

Bubble sensing is the new paradigm for binding a sensing task to the physical world
using mobile phones. The bubble sensing is the new sensor network abstraction that
allows mobile phone users to create a binding between tasks and the physical world at the
location of interest, which remains active for the duration set by the user. Here when a
user with a phone that has opted into the bubble sensing system visits a location of
interest, presses a button on his phone to affix the sensing request to the location. The
sensing request persists at location until the timeout set by the initiator is reached. And
the sensed data will be available in a delay tolerant fashion, in essence, creating a living
documentary.

2.1 Bubble sensing architecture

Figure.2.1: Bubble sensing architecture and bubble management.

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In the Figure.2.1 Phone A is the task creator. A is moved by its human carrier to
the area of interest, and attempts to attach the sensing bubble to the area by broadcasting
the sensing task via its local radio, and also registers the task with the bubble server via
its cellular radio. Stationary phone B receives the task broadcasts from A and assumes the
role of a bubble anchor. As the mobility of A takes it out of the bubble area (indicated by
the dashed circle), the phone B which is the bubble anchor takes over the management of
the sensing task by continuing to broadcast the sensing task to passersby. If the bubbles
anchor phone B later moves away, the bubble temporarily disappears. A phone C that
later moves through the area of interest is signaled by the bubble server, becomes a
bubble carrier, and tries to re-affix the sensing bubble by broadcasting the task via its
local radio. Sensed data gathered by phones which are either bubble anchor or the bubble
carrier that accept the sensing task broadcasted by the bubble creator, bubble anchor, or
bubble carrier can be uploaded in real time via the cellular network, or in a delay-tolerant
fashion via a local radio gateway (e.g., WiFi).

Sensing tasks are created and maintained in the bubble-sensing system through
the interaction of a number of virtual roles, where a given physical node can take on one
or more virtual roles based on its location, device capabilities (e.g., communication
mode, sensor), user configuration (when and to what extent resources should be shared
for the common good), device state (e.g., an ongoing phone call may preclude taking an
audio sample for another application), and device environment (e.g., a picture taken
inside the pocket may not be meaningful to the data consumer). In the bubble sensing
system, a task is a tuple of the form
(Action, context, region, duration)
The action can be any kind of sensing operation such as ‘‘take a photo'', or
‘‘record a sound/video clip''. The context parameter specifies the set of conditions under
which the action should occur.

Examples of context categories include sensor orientation and position on the

body, and the speed or activity of the sensor carrier. The region is defined as the tuple
(location, radius), where location is a point in a coordinate system like GPS indicating the
center of the region, and the radius defines the area of the region. The granularity of the

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radius is related to the local communication technology (e.g., Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi) in use.
We call this region of interest the ‘‘sensing bubble''. In the following, we describe each of
the virtual roles (i.e., bubble creator, bubble anchor, sensing node, and bubble carrier) in
the context of the major system operations: bubble creation, bubble maintenance, bubble
restoration. Figure.2.1 gives a pictorial representation of the bubble-sensing system
operation and the main bubble management steps. The following subsections gives the
clear idea of bubble sensing architecture.

2.2 Bubble creation

The bubble creator is the device whose user initiates the sensing request that leads to the
creation of the sensing bubble. Generally speaking, there are two ways a bubble can be
created.

In the first scenario, the creator is a mobile phone. The phone's carrier moves to
the location of interest and creates the sensing task and it perform the sensing operation
and send the sensed data to user.

In the second scenario, the creator is any entity that registers a task with the
bubble server, but does interact with other nodes at the location of interest in support of
the sensing. As the process flow for the second case is a subset of the first, in the
following we omit any further explicit discussion of the second scenario.

Proceeding with a discussion of the first scenario, we assume the bubble creator is
a mobile device at the location of interest with a short range radio for local peer
interactions. The creator (e.g., node A in Figure. 2.1) broadcasts the sensing task using its
short range radio. If the user has enabled cellular data access to the backend bubble
server, the creator also registers the task with the bubble server. If the creator has
localization capability, it populates the region field of the task definition, and the sensing
bubble is created with its center at this location. Otherwise, the region field of the task is
left blank in the broadcast, and the sensing bubble is created with its center at the current

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location of the creator where the area of the bubble is determined by its radio
transmission range. Note, that if the creator is not able to obtain a location estimate and
register its task with the bubble server, it will not be possible to restore the bubble later in
case the bubble disappears due to temporary lack of suitable mobile nodes in the area of
interest. Nodes that receive the task broadcast, and meet the hardware and context
requirements, for the sensing task can then sense in support of the task and will later
upload the sensed data to the bubble server in either a delay-tolerant (e.g., opportunistic
rendezvous with an open Wi-Fi access point), or real-time (e.g., the cellular data channel)
manner.

2.3 Bubble maintenance

Given the uncontrolled mobility of the creator, it may happen that the creator leaves the
bubble location while the bubble task is still active (as specified in the duration field of
the task). If this happens, it is no longer appropriate for the creator to broadcast the task
since recipients of this broadcast will not be in the target bubble location. A way to
anchor the bubble to the location of interest is needed; the bubble anchor role fills this
requirement (e.g., node B in Figure 2.1). The node that takes on this role should be
relatively stationary at the target location of the task. We propose two variants for bubble
anchor selection, one that requires localization capability on all nodes (e.g., GPS), and
one that uses inference from an accelerometer for mobility detection.

2.3.1 Location-based:

In the location-based approach, all nodes that find themselves in the sensing bubble with
knowledge of the bubble task (i.e., they can hear the bubble task broadcasts) are potential
anchor candidates. If the candidate does not hear another anchor (as indicated by a
special field populated in the bubble task broadcast) for a particular threshold time,
indicating the bubble is not currently covered by an anchor, it prepares to become the
anchor for that bubble. Each candidate anchor backs off a time proportional to its
mobility as measured by speed inferred from changes in the location fixes. After this
back off time, a candidate that does not overhear any other anchor broadcasting the task

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then assumes the role of bubble anchor. The anchor will continue to broadcast the task
beacon (with the special field to indicate an anchor is sending it) until it moves out of the
location of interest for that bubble. Here again the data is classified by using mobile
phone accelerometer.

2.3.2 Mobility-based:

In the mobility-based approach, like the location-based approach, nodes that can hear the
bubble task broadcasts are potential anchor candidates. If the candidate does not hear
another anchor broadcasting the bubble task, it backs off a time proportional to its
mobility (e.g. stationary, moving, or moving fast), as inferred from data collected by its
accelerometer. After this back-off time, a candidate that does not overhear any other
anchor broadcasting the task then assumes the role of bubble anchor. The anchor will
continue to broadcast the task beacon (with the special field to indicate an anchor is
sending it) until it moves out of the location of interest for that bubble. In this case, the
mobility is again determined through classification of data from the on-board
accelerometer.

2.4 Challenges in bubble maintenance

The broadcast-based approach to bubble maintenance introduces two main sources of

error to the data collected in support of the sensing task.

First, since its not require sensing nodes to have knowledge of their absolute
location, recipients of the task broadcast that are outside of the bubble area defined in the
broadcast may still collect and upload data to the bubble server. This potentially makes
the effective bubble size larger than the specified bubble size. The extent of this
distortion depends both on the radio range of the task broadcast, and the location of the
broadcaster (i.e., bubble creator, bubble anchor, and bubble carrier) with respect to the
specified bubble canter location. If location-based bubble maintenance is used, or if the
sensing node has localization capabilities, the location information may be used to
compensate for the transmission power of the task broadcast or suppress sensing when
nodes are outside of the defined bubble area to reduce this bubble distortion.

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The second source of error is bubble drift, which can happen for two reasons.
First, drift can happen over time if the anchor moves but continues to broadcast the
bubble task due to inaccuracy in its mobility/location-detection methods. While
improvements in localization technology and mobility classification can help here, we
also explicitly limit the consecutive amount of time a node can act as the anchor for a
given bubble. Assuming a probabilistic mobility/location error model, it would be
possible to calculate the appropriate timeout to probabilistically limit the bubble drift
below a desired level. The second cause of bubble drift is limited to the mobility-based
bubble maintenance method where ubiquitous localization not assumed. In this case, as
the current anchor gives up its role (e.g., out of battery, anchor role timeout, or move out
of the bubble region), one of other semi-stationary or slow moving nodes available in the
bubble will take over the anchor role. This can be viewed as a passive role handoff.
However, with each handoff the canter of the bubble drifts to the location of the new
anchor and over time this can markedly distort the sensing coverage of the bubble. To
counteract this source of drift, we implement a limit on the number of anchor handoffs.
After the handoff limit is reached, the anchor must be reinitialized by the bubble
restoration process described in the following section. We note that if mobile devices
have continuous localization capability (e.g., using GPS, GPS assisted with GSM, Wi-
Fi), then bubble distortion and drift is limited by the localization inaccuracy.

2.5 Bubble restoration

Due to node mobility, it may happen that no nodes are available to anchor the bubble to
the desired location and the bubble may temporarily disappear. To address this scenario,
the bubble-sensing system provides a mechanism for bubble restoration through the
actions of bubble carrier nodes (e.g., node C in Figure. 2.1). Mobile phones filling the
bubble carrier role require localization capability and a connection to the backend bubble
server. Bubble carriers periodically contact the bubble server, update their location, and
request any active sensing bubbles in the current region. If a bubble carrier visits the
location of one of these bubbles and does not hear any task broadcasts, it attempts to
restore the bubble by broadcasting the task without the special anchor field set (in the

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same way the bubble creator did initially). Through this method, either the bubble will be
restored with a new anchor node taking over the bubble maintenance, or this attempt at
restoration fails. Bubble restoration attempts continue via the bubble carriers until the
bubble expires (as indicated by the duration field in the bubble task definition).

Once the bubble is created, and the bubble is properly maintained the sensed data
will be available for the user in delay tolerant fashion either directly from the sensing
mobile phone or through the bubble server. Then these data received can be used for
several applications.

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Chapter 3
Implementation

Here building the proof-of-concept mobile cell phone test bed to demonstrate the bubble-
sensing system. The test bed consists of Nokia N80 and N95 smart phones, both of which
run Symbian OS S60 v3. Due to the security platform in Symbian, some hardware access
APIs are restricted at the OS level and are not open to developers, or require a high
privilege certificate. In light of the platform limitations on these two mobile phones, in
this section, we discuss the options available and our implementation choices. The
bubble-sensing architecture implemented on each mobile device is shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure.3.1: The bubble-sensing architecture implemented on each mobile device.

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3.1 Programming language

The PyS60 is used to prototype our system. PyS60 is Nokia's port of Python to the
Symbian platform. It not only supports the standard features of Python, but also has
access to the phone's functions and the on-board sensors (e.g., camera, microphone,
accelerometer and GPS), software (e.g., contacts, calendar), and communications (e.g.,
TCP/IP, Bluetooth, and simple telephony). In addition to that, the developer can easily
add access to the native Symbian APIs using the C/C++ extension module. In this regard,
PyS60 is more flexible than Java J2ME in providing robust access to native sensor APIs
and phone state, as we discovered in our initial development.

3.2 Communication

The Nokia N80 and N95 mobile phones are both equipped with GPRS/EDGE, 3G,
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi interfaces. For data uplink, they can leverage GPRS, SMS, and
MMS for near universal connectivity, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth access points can also provide
Internet access when available. For local peer-to-peer communication, Bluetooth and Wi-
Fi are two possible choices. In our test bed, Wi-Fi is our choice for both local
communication and communication to the Internet. Considering the cost of the data
service for GPRS and existing open Wi-Fi infrastructure in the academic and urban
environments, Wi-Fi is a viable option for Internet access. To implement bubble-sensing,
broadcast is fundamental and indispensable. While our initial choice for local
communication was Bluetooth since it currently enjoys a higher rate of integration into
mobile phones, we found peer-to-peer broadcast with Bluetooth technology to be
particularly difficult. Fortunately, we can configure the phones to use the Ad-Hoc IEEE
802.11 mode and the UDP broadcasting over Wi-Fi is relatively easy to use. In our
current version, the phone uses Ad-Hoc mode when interacting locally with peers, and
infrastructure mode to connect to the bubble server. The communications component
manages the switch between these two modes on the fly as necessary. The lag of the
mode switch is as low as a few seconds. We also set the transmit power of the Wi-Fi
interface to its lowest, 4 mW, in order to save energy.

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The brief description communication tools are as follows:

3.2.1 Bluetooth

Bluetooth is a proprietary open wireless technology standard for exchanging data over
short distances (using short wavelength radio transmissions) from fixed and mobile
devices, creating personal area networks (Pans’) with high levels of security.

3.2.2 GPRS

General packet radio service (GPRS) is a packet oriented mobile data service on the
2G and 3G cellular communication systems global system for mobile communications
(GSM).

3.2.3 EDGE

Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) is a digital mobile

phone technology that allows improved data transmission rates as a backward-
compatible extension of GSM.

3.2.4 Wi-Fi

A Wi-Fi enabled device such as a personal computer, video game console, Smartphone,
or digital audio player can connect to the Internet when within range of a wireless
network connected to the Internet.

3.3 Sensors

Camera and microphone sensors are universal on mobile phones nowadays. In our
experiment, to save storage and lower the transmission load, we use lower resolution

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pictures (640 x 480 pixels). For sound, we record two second sound clips in .au format;
each sound clip is about 28 kB. All data collected are time stamped. For the
accelerometer and GPS sensors, the N95 comes with an on-board GPS and a built-in 3D
accelerometer. We extend the N80 using the external BluCel device (see Fig. 3),
basically a Bluetooth-connected 3D accelerometer. Both types of accelerometers are
calibrated, and the data output are normalized to earth's gravity. The sampling rate is set
to 40 Hz. The sensor manager component coordinates the interleaved sampling of the
various sensors, and configures the sensors to sample according to the parameters passed
to it by the task manager.

The two main sensors in mobile phones are:

3.3.1 Camera

A camera in a mobile phone is able to capture either still photographs or video. Most
camera phones are simpler than separate digital cameras. Their usual fixed focus lenses
and smaller sensors limit their performance in poor lighting. The camera in the mobile
phones senses the picture as well as helps to take videos.

3.3.2 Microphones

Microphone is acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an

electrical signal. The microphone in the mobile phone senses the sound or audio signals.

3.4 Classifier

Given the hardware and energy constraints of the mobile phone, we implement a simple
light weight activity classifier, which consists of two components: a preprocessor and the
activity classifier itself.

The preprocessor normalizes the raw accelerometer data it receives from the

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sensor manager, packs them to 160 four second bins, and then extracts features
(attributes) considering each bin separately. Given the constraints of the mobile platform,
instead of more computationally costly operations such as FFT, we use simple features
such as the mean, standard deviation, and number of peaks for each axis. To achieve
better activity inference, prior work suggests that the best position to mount the device is
around the hip. However, people may carry a cell phone in different manner (e.g., in a
pocket, in a purse), so we cannot make an arbitrary assumption about the cell phone's
position and orientation while being carried. Therefore, it is impossible to predetermine a
particular accelerometer axis whose data would lead to the best classification.
Consequently, we treat the three axes equally and merge the three feature vectors
together.

Figure.3.2: The BluCel device provides a 3D accelerometer that can be connected to the mobile phone
(e.g., Nokia N95 or N80) via Bluetooth.

Here classification is based on the decision tree algorithm, which is a supervised

machine learning technique. The computationally expensive training process of the
classifier is run offline. We collected the training set for our classifier by having the
mobile phone carried by 10 people for several days in their daily routine. They annotate
the data when they are sitting, standing, walking and running. Since when sitting and
standing, people stay in the same place, we combine them together as the stationary case.
Walking means people are moving; running indicates people moving fast. Complicated

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movements like stair-climbing and cycling will likely by classified as either walking or
running. We extract the features for each activity state and then we feed the data set to
the J48 decision tree algorithm in the WEKA toolkit. The output of the decision tree
algorithm is a small tree with depth three. The classifier is light weight and efficient; the
time needed for the preprocessor and the classifier to analyze each bin of samples is less
than 1 s on the Nokia N95. On a node currently acting as a bubble anchor, the virtual role
manager component resigns its role if the activity classifier informs it that the node is
moving (walking or running state) to maintain the stationary property of the sensing
bubble. On a potential anchor, the activity classifier informs the virtual role manager
about the mobility (e.g., stationary, slow, or fast) of the node to help it determine the
appropriate back-off time before replying. Since our system only requires the
discrimination between common human mobility patterns, this light weight classifier
provides sufficient accuracy.

3.4.1 Accelerometer

The accelerometer in mobiles (like the iPhone) is used to measure the orientation or
vertical and horizontal positioning of the phone. The most basic application of this is the
device knowing when to alternate the view of the screen depending on how you are
holding it. In addition this feature allows app developers to utilize this feature in games
.

3.5 Localization

There are many existing solutions that provide a localization service for mobile phones,
including built-in/external connected GPS, cell-tower triangulation (GSM fingerprint),
Bluetooth indoor localization, and WiFi localization systems such as Skyhook and
Navizon. For Symbian, to get all the cell towers information requires a high privilege
certificate not available to most developers. Usually, the developer can only get the
information about the cell tower to which the phone is currently connected. This does
provide a rough sense of where the device is, but is not sufficient for the triangulation

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algorithm. Therefore, in the outdoor case we simply use GPS. For indoor, the WiFi
fingerprint is a natural choice for academic and urban environments, given the relatively
widespread coverage of WiFi infrastructure. The localization component manages
location acquisition accordingly.

3.5.1 GPS

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based global navigation satellite

system (GNSS) that provides reliable location and time information in all weather and at
all times and anywhere on or near the Earth when and where there is an unobstructed line
of sight to four or more GPS satellites.

3.5.2 Cell tower triangulation

This method physically measures the distance of a cell phone user from the closest three
cell-towers. A signal is sent out from the phone to each tower and device measures the
time it takes for the signal to reach the tower from the phone. The signals sent out from
the phone create a triangle with the three nearest towers and dispatchers know that the
caller is somewhere in the middle of the three points. Depending on the equipment, this
method can get emergency crews within 100 meters of the caller.

3.6 System integration

In this current implementation, we use a user interface component to allow for the
injecting of sensing tasks into the system. The task manager receives these tasks and
coordinates the assignment of virtual roles among mobile peers that rendezvous in the
field. The task manager also oversees the collection and upload of data to the backend.
Use of the mobile phone as a sensor in the bubble-sensing system should not interfere
with the normal usage of the mobile phone. Our bubble-sensing software implementation
is light weight, and users can easily switch its user interface to background to use their

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phone as usual. The software only accesses sensors on demand and releases the resources
immediately after use. An incoming or user-initiated voice call has high priority, and our
software does not try to access the microphone when it detects a call connection. By
adapting in this way, our implementation does not disrupt an ongoing call and also the
bubble sensing application will not get killed by an incoming call. We test the CPU and
memory usage of our software in a Nokia N95, using a bench mark application, CPU
Monitor. The peak CPU usage is around 25%, which happens when sound clips are
taken. Otherwise, the CPU usage is about 3%. The memory usage is below 5% of the free
memory, including the overhead of the python virtual machine and all the external
modules.

3.7 Data storage

The sensed data obtained from bubble anchors will stored in the bubble server with a
proper format. A database is maintained in this sever for the storage of data. The location
time, the actual data n bubble anchors details will be maintained. So this will help in the
feature use of data for many applications. If the user request for the same data since it is
already available in the server, the server will directly pass it to the user. In such case
bubble creation is not required.

Since the mobile phones itself has built-in internal memory and as it supports
external memory through memory card the data received from the bubble server can be
stored easily. By connecting data cable or through the Bluetooth, or through the card
reader the data in mobile phones can be transmitted to computer system.

3.8 Battery

The battery is one of the main requirements of sensor nodes. Every mobile phone has the
battery which can be charged whenever required and which is capable of serving the

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bubble sensing architecture. Recent mobile phones have very good batteries which serve
for longer time. And moreover the mobile phones are under the control of user, the
decrease in the battery power can be easily noticed and the battery can be charged with
suitable mobile phone battery chargers.

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Chapter 4
Privacy and Security concerns

Bubble-sensing presents privacy and security challenges which can be directly addressed
or indirectly addressed but which likely must be addressed for most people to feel
comfortable using the system. These challenges center around:

(i) The sharing of device resources with unknown third parties.

(ii) The privacy implications that result from the collection of people-centric sensor
data.

These apply generally to any urban sensing system and remain an active focus of
research. Below we discuss some of the most dominant problems specific to the bubble-
sensing system along with recent results that can be leveraged to address these issues.

Participants within a bubble-sensing system are subject to having sensitive

contextual state about themselves monitored by the infrastructure (e.g., location), which
is required for smart task assignment and bubble maintenance. Anonymity preserving
context collection and task assignment for opportunistic sensing such as bubble-sensing
have been demonstrated. The bubble-sensing architecture may be augmented according
to these existing proposals to help preserve the privacy of system users.

Even if users trust the bubble-sensing infrastructure, individuals' privacy

concerning their daily activities is still at risk from other users if the system is misused. A
sensing bubble can be established in any location, however the people who enter these
locations should have the ability to stop sensor data being collected about them if they
wish. This issue becomes more complicated when there are conflicting preferences
between multiple people in the same physical location. Kapadia, et al. has proposed the
concept of ''virtual walls'' to resolve of such conflicts and allow people to control their
exposure to bubble-sensing's sensing infrastructure. Alternatively, individuals' privacy

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can be managed by limiting the representation of data delivered to system users. For
example, aggregate summaries (e.g., mean, variance etc.) may be used instead of
individual images, sound clips and temperature readings. Even as exposure to other users
is limited, an individual can take steps to assure that their own higher resolution data can
be recovered.

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Chapter 5
Applications

The bubble sensing: Binding the sensing tasks to physical world in turn called as sensor
network of mobile phones has a great deal of applications.

5.1 Participatory sensing

Participatory sensing is the process whereby individuals and communities use evermore-
capable mobile phones and cloud services to collect and analyze systematic data for use
in discovery. The convergence of technology and analytical innovation with a citizenry
that is increasingly comfortable using mobile phones and online social networking sets
the stage for this technology to dramatically impact many aspects of our daily lives. The
participatory sensing has following applications

5.1.1 Public health

Many possibilities exist for participatory sensing campaigns in public health: Individuals,
health care providers, and community / government organizations could initiate opt-in
activities to evaluate and support individualized and preventative care regimens, gather
data for retrospective analysis of causes of chronic and environmentally affected health
issues, and generally to collect a wide range of high-fidelity health statistics for a
population of interest. Autonomously captured and selectively shared activity pattern
Information could help chronic patients and their doctors link environmental factors with
symptoms, while explicit data gathering might include automatic upload of at-home, self-
administered diagnostic tests. Guided, retagged data entry enables better compliance
detection, timely trend and anomaly analysis, patient reminders and data quality
feedback. Input mechanisms for data could include Bluetooth transfer of instrument
readings when available; direct patient / caretaker input via structured text input in a local
or web-based application; voice entry interpreted locally or on a server; input via cell

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phone camera image of test output (display or strip) could be vetted by trained
evaluators.[3]

Figure 5.1: Measuring blood pressure by using mobile phone sensors

Also individuals can self-monitor to observe and adjust their medication, physical
activity, nutrition, and interactions. Potential contexts include chronic-disease
management and health behavior change. Communities and health professionals can also
use participatory approaches to better understand the development and effective
treatment of disease. Sensor-enabled mobile phones have the potential to collect in situ
continuous sensor data that can dramatically change the way health and wellness are
assessed as well as how care and treatment are delivered . Figure 5.1 shows the blood
pressure measurement by using the cell phone.

EPI Life mobile phone from EPhone (Singapore) is a world’s first mobile phone
with a built-in ECG (electrocardiogram) to measure heart rate. EPI Life phone not only
measures heart rate but it is also able to send the results / data to the medical team to be
analyzed by doctors

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Figure. 5.2: Performing ECG using mobile phone sensors

This architecture also helps in using mobile phones for measuring blood pressure, sugar
rate, and also to perform Echo Cardio-Graphy (ECG) of the individual and transferring
the results to the physician mobile phone. Physician will receives the results and suggest
the medicine through the mobile only. The Figure 5.2 shows the mobile phone ECG
process. This is the major application of mobile phones as a sensor network in public
health.

5.1.2 Urban planning

Mobile sensing also known as participatory sensing, urban sensing or participatory

urbanism enables data collection from large numbers of people in ways that previously
were not possible. By affixing a sensory device to a mobile phone, mobile sensing
provides the opportunity to track multiple data points and collect dynamic information
about environmental trends from ambient air quality to urban traffic patterns. Sparse

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sensing strategy does little to capture the very dynamic variability of air quality that
depends on automobile traffic patterns, human activity, and output of industries.

By lowering the complexity of creating trustable ad-hoc observing applications at

the metropolitan scale, participatory sensing enables a very exciting application space for
urban planning. Participatory sensing tools will enable organizations to initiate data
collection that similarly connect people (and their data) to the planning of their own
environments. A participatory sensing approach suggests that a simple service running on
citizens’ mobile devices, gathering and publishing basic statistics on ambient sound at
regular intervals, with appropriate context checks, might be able to gather such data.
Citizens could join a data-collection campaign to document noise levels in a community.
They would configure simple selective sharing options to choose when and where
samples are taken to calculate average sound amplitude, as well as the spatial and
temporal resolution acceptable for network context tagging. A collaboratively generated
city-scale analysis of noise levels at different times a day becomes feasible. When
combined with participatory GIS techniques, incredible potential exists for developing
important, accessible planning tools for communities of all sizes.[3]

5.1.3 Cultural identity and creative expression

Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture of an individual as far as one is

influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Bubble sensing will helps to make
living documentary of religion belief, ethnic, language, historical memories etc., by
taking the photos in very special area, or special region. This will also helps in expressing
these things in a creative way.[3]

5.1.4 Natural resource management

Natural Resource Management refers to the management of natural resources such as

land, water, soil, plants and animals, with a particular focus on how management affects
the quality of life for both present and future generations. Bubble sensing architecture

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will helps in a structured way for the management of natural resources and also solving
environmental issues.

Conventional ways of measuring and reporting environmental pollution rely on

aggregate statistics that apply to a community or an entire city. Uses sensors in phones to
build a system that enables personalized environmental impact reports, which track how
the actions of individuals affect both their exposure and their contribution to problems
such as carbon emissions.

CENS: Center for Embedded Networked Sensing is developing the ecoPDA, a

mobile, manually operated device designed to enable and increase the fidelity of field
data gathered by environmental scientists and ecologists. Their paper-based data
collection protocols have been translated into campaign descriptions, with field scientists
acting as gatherers. Providing automated context tagging and uploading will minimize
data gaps and data quality can be improved by providing some immediate feedback
verification of correct data capture. In fact, both data quality and quantity are expected to
improve over current manual and semi-automated models, including paper notebooks and
direct PDA entry (without feedback). Image and acoustic sensing capabilities on the
mobile devices can provide automatically analyzed data streams and human interpretable
data as well as quantify some subjective data inputs. They also can gather detailed,
systematic metadata; image and sound annotations can be automatically linked to data
entry so observation of anomalies can be retrospectively investigated. As primary data
capture, media can be directly stored or converted either locally or on the server to
numeric data using digital signal and image processing tailored to the specific context
and tasks. As in in-home medical tests, visual test result indicators can be imaged next to
calibrated reference charts, or images of foliage can be analyzed for density and other
physiological Characteristics as in remote sensing.[3]

In addition, participatory sensing offers a powerful “make a case” technique to

support advocacy and civic engagement. It can provide a framework in which citizens
can bring to light a civic bottleneck, hazard, personal-safety concern, cultural asset, or

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other data relevant to urban and natural-resources planning and services, all using data
that are systematic and can be validated.
5.2 SkiSkape sensing

One of the most important applications of bubble sensing is skiskape sensing. The
skiskape sensing is the approach mainly designed for the skiers. SkiScape, an application
for downhill ski resorts focusing on gathering semi-regular trail condition data for
immediate feedback to the skier population, and also tracking skier mobility to enable
both real-time response, and long-term trace analysis.[5]
Skiers are interested in knowing current trail conditions (e.g., ice, bare spots,
congestion) when at the base of the mountain in order to determine which lift to use to
get to the desired trail head at the top of the mountain. Resort managers are interested in
learning skier flow statistics to estimate wear on the terrain in order to enact preventative
maintenance (e.g., close trail, make artificial snow). Safety/emergency personnel are
interested in tracking skiers’ location and speed in case of accidents (e.g., fall off trail,
avalanche), and also to prevent accidents by speed policing. Skiers may be interested in
tracking their own location or the location of their friends on the mountain. Mobile phone
sensors, mounted on skiers, can collect data in their locality as the skier traverses the
mountain. Skiers opportunistically collect/carry data of interest as they travel along the
trails to the data sinks at the base.[5]

5.3 Mobiscopes of human spaces

Mobiscope is a federation of distributed mobile sensors into a taskable sensing system

that achieves high density sampling coverage over a wide area through mobility.
Mobiscopes affordably extend into regions that static sensors cannot, proving especially
useful for applications that only occasionally require data from each location. [4]

Users ranging from police officers to citizens could use their cell phone cameras
to photograph trouble spots in their neighborhood. Such a civic system could request that

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police officers document unexplored areas or intervene in trouble spots. A similar
concept of camera-based mapping can apply to tourism. For example, tourists at the Taj
Mahal might share their photographs in virtual albums that potential visitors can then
browse to see all perspectives of the mausoleum. Researchers have paid special attention
to metadata management to facilitate such sharing. [4]

5.4 Reality mining: Sensing complex social systems

Reality mining is the ability to use standard Bluetooth-enabled mobile telephones to

measure information access and use in different contexts, recognize social patterns in
daily user activity, infer relationships, identify socially significant locations, and model
organizational rhythms. Reality mining describes how data collected from mobile phones
can be used to uncover regular rules and structure in the behavior of both individuals and
organizations.
Mobile phones as wearable sensor collect a much larger dataset on human behavior. The
very nature of mobile phones makes them an ideal vehicle to study both individuals and
organizations: people habitually carry their mobile phones with them and use them as a
medium for much of their communication. In this paper we capture all the information to
which the phone has access (with the exception of content from phone calls or text
messages) and describe how it can be used to provide insight into both the individual and
the collective.[9]

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Chapter 6
Advantages and Disadvantages

6.1 Advantages

The bubble sensing paradigm has several advantages. They are as follows:

 There is no occurrence of ‘VOID PROBLEM’ which is most common in Wireless

Sensor Network:
The void problem also known as unreachability problem is the problem which

arises in the process of routing in the Wireless Sensor Network . While routing if the
node does not find the neighbor nearest to the destination, this problem will occur.
But in the bubble sensing as mobile phones acts as the sensor nodes which is
basically a communication device it just perform single hop routing so there is no
chance of arising the void problem.
 In bubble sensing as mobile phones which are under the control of its user playing the
role of sensor nodes the maintenance of battery is easier.
 As this architecture does not require any specialized infrastructure, it is very easy to
implement.
 This supports portability and flexibility..

 Easy to maintain.

6.2 Disadvantages

Bubble sensing is also having the limitation:

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 Since the mobility of the phones is uncontrolled there is no guarantee that sensors will
be well-placed to sample the desired location specified by the sensing task

Chapter 8
Conclusion

The bubble sensing is an approach to support persistent location-specific task in a

wireless sensor network composed of mobile phones. Mobile sensor nodes collaborate
and share sensing and communication resources with each other in a cooperative sensing
environment. Bubble sensing approach describes the virtual roles nodes that can assume
in support of bubble-sensing, including the required local and backend communication.
The applications of the bubble sensing mechanism are clearly described. This approach
has lots of advantages and very little limitation. If Proper support is provided, the bubble
sensing which the sensor network of mobile phones will become the emerging new
technology.

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References

[1] Hong Lu, Nicholas D. Lane, Shane B. Eisenman, Andrew T. Campbell. Bubble-
Sensing: A New Paradigm for Binding a Sensing Task to the Physical World using
Mobile Phones, 2010.

[2] A.T. Campbell, S.B. Eisenman, N.D. Lane, E. Miluzzo, R.A. Peterson, People-centric
urban sensing, in: Proc. of 2nd ACM/IEEE Int'l Conf. on Wireless Internet, WICON'06,
ACM Int'l Conf. Proc. Series, vol. 220, No. 18, Boston, Aug 2-5, 2006, (Invited Paper).

[3] J. Burke, D. Estrin, M. Hansen, A. Parker, N. Ramanathan, S. Reddy, M.B.

Srivastava, Participatory sensing, in: Proc. of 1st Workshop on Wireless Sensor Web,
WSW'06, Boulder, October 31, 2006, pp. 1-5.

[4] T. Abdelzaher, Y. Anokwa, P. Boda, J. Burke, D. Estrin, L. Guibas, A. Kansal, S.

Madden, J. Reich, Mobiscopes for human spaces, IEEE Pervasive Computing 6 (2)
(2007) 20-29.

[5] S.B. Eisenman, A.T. Campbell, SkiScape sensing, in: Proc. of ACM 4th Int'l Conf.
Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SENSYS'04, 2006.

[6] S.B.Eisenman, E. Miluzzo, N.D. Lane, R.A. Peterson, G.-S. Ahn, A.T. Campbell, The
BikeNet mobile sensing system for cyclist experience mapping, in: Proc. of 5th ACM
Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SENSYS'05, Sydney, Nov 6-9, 2007.

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[7] C. Frank, K. Römer, Algorithms for generic role assignment in wireless sensor
networks, in: Proc. of 3rd Int'l Conf. on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems,
SENSYS'05, San Diego, Nov 2-4, 2005, pp. 230-242.
[8] E. Miluzzo, X. Zheng, K. Fodor, A.T. Campbell, Radio Characterization of 802.15. 4
and its Impact on the Design of Mobile Sensor Networks, in: Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, vol. 4913, 2008, p. 171

[9] N. Eagle and A. Pentland. Reality Mining: Sensing Complex Social Systems. In
Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Jun 2005.

[10] http://mobileactive.org/urban-sensing-mobile-phones-data-collection

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