ENERGY-EFFICIENT NEIGHBOUR DISCOVERY: PROTOCOLS AND APPLICATIONS

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "ENERGY-EFFICIENT NEIGHBOUR DISCOVERY: PROTOCOLS AND APPLICATIONS"

By

Mr. Keyu WANG


Abstract

The continual proliferation of mobile devices has stimulated the 
development of opportunistic encounter-based networking and has spurred a 
myriad of proximity-based applications. These devices are envisioned as an 
increasingly important information interface between neighbouring users. A 
primary cornerstone of such applications is to build up a bridge 
connecting devices efficiently and effectively. In this thesis proposal, 
we address two challenging topics in this area named neighbour discovery 
and spatial-awareness device interaction. In the first work, we design a 
deterministic neighbour discovery protocol named Blind-Date for both 
asynchronous symmetry problem and asynchronous asymmetry problem. By 
theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, Blind-Date is shown to 
guarantee the discovery latency as 9/10 (1+δ)2x2 where δ is a small 
fraction of slot length and 1/x is the duty cycle, which advances the 
state-of-the-art in both average performance and worst-case bound. In the 
second work, we are enlightened by the fact that neighbouring devices 
share similar ambient information as they are spatially close. Thus, we 
design a novel neighbor discovery protocol named AIR that exploits ambient 
acoustic information to complete neighbor discovery in shorter time. AIR 
substantially increases the discovery probability of the first time they 
turn the radio on via low power acoustic sensing, which significantly 
decreases the average discovery latency. In the third work, we propose a 
novel system for initiating device interactions in close proximity with 
zero prior configuration. We utilise built-in microphones and speakers on 
commodity devices for the purpose of initiating device interactions by a 
simple waving gesture. Our experimental results show its feasibility and 
potential to be applied on applications ranging from Person-to-Person 
interactions to Person-to-Device interactions.


Date:			Friday, 12 June 2015

Time:			4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:			Room 4472
 			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. John Barford (CBME)

Committee Members:	Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Qiong Luo
 			Prof. Ke Yi
 			Prof. Zikang Tang (PHYS)
 			Prof. Jianping Wang (CityU)


**** ALL are Welcome ****