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Deploying wireless sensor networks in the ocean poses many challenges due to the harsh conditions of the ocean and the nonnegligible node mobility. In this paper, we propose hybrid ocean sensor networks called drifting restricted floating ocean sensor networks (DR-OSNs) for long-term maritime surveillance monitoring tasks, which combines both the advantages of wireless sensor networks and underwater wireless acoustic sensor networks. We present a localization scheme termed localization for double-head maritime sensor networks (LDSN) for DR-OSNs, which leverages the unique characteristics of DR-OSNs to establish the whole localization system after the network is deployed from a plane or a ship, and it does not need the presence of designated anchor nodes deployed underwater. The whole localization process consists of three steps with algorithms self-moored node localization (SML), underwater sensor localization (USD), and floating-node localization algorithm (FLA). The first step is for the super group nodes to localize their underwater moored nodes via an SML algorithm by leveraging the free-drifting movement of their surface nodes. Once the moored nodes in the super group nodes have localized themselves, they turn into anchor nodes underwater. Thus, in the second step, with the help of these new anchor nodes, the unlocalized underwater moored nodes use the USD algorithm to localize their positions. In the last step, when the free-drifting floating nodes without a Global Positioning System (GPS) module need to know their instant position, they apply the FLA to figure out their position. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the scheme, with the results indicating that LDSN achieves high localization accuracy and is an effective localization scheme for DR-OSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Crowdedness spot is a crowded area with an abnormal number of objects. Detecting the crowdedness spots of moving vehicles in an urban area is essential to many applications. An intuitive method is to cluster the objects in areas to get the density information. Unfortunately, the data capturing vehicle mobility possesses some new features, such as highly mobile environments, supremely limited size of sample objects, and nonuniform biased samples, and all these features have raised new challenges that make traditional density-based clustering algorithms fail to retrieve the real clustering property of objects, making the results less meaningful. In this paper, we propose a novel nondensity-based approach called mobility-based clustering. The key idea is that sample objects are employed as “sensors” to perceive the vehicle crowdedness in nearby areas using their instant mobility rather than the “object representatives.” As such, the mobility of samples is naturally incorporated. Several key factors beyond the vehicle crowdedness have been identified, and techniques to compensate these effects are accordingly proposed. Furthermore, taking the detected crowdedness spots as a label of the taxi, we can identify one particular taxi to be a crowdedness taxi that crosses a number of different crowdedness spots. We evaluate the performance of our methods and baseline approaches based on real traffic situations (to retrieve the real traffic crowdedness) and real-life data sets. Finally, the interesting findings are provided for further discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Intercontact time between moving vehicles is one of the key metrics in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and central to forwarding algorithms and the end-to-end delay. Due to prohibitive costs, little work has conducted experimental study on intercontact time in urban vehicular environments. In this paper, we carry out an extensive experiment involving thousands of operational taxies in Shanghai city. Studying the taxi trace data on the frequency and duration of transfer opportunities between taxies, we observe that the tail distribution of the intercontact time, that is, the time gap separating two contacts of the same pair of taxies, exhibits an exponential decay, over a large range of timescale. This observation is in sharp contrast to recent empirical data studies based on human mobility, in which the distribution of the intercontact time obeys a power law. By analyzing a simplified mobility model that captures the effect of hot areas in the city, we rigorously prove that common traffic influxes, where large volume of traffic converges, play a major role in generating the exponential tail of the intercontact time. Our results thus provide fundamental guidelines on design of new vehicular mobility models in urban scenarios, new data forwarding protocols and their performance analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]