Using future internet infrastructure and smartphones for mobility trace acquisition and social interactions monitoring

Abstract

Recent activity in the field of Internet-of-Things experimentation has focused on the federation of discrete testbeds, thus placing less effort in the integration of other related technologies, such as smartphones; also, while it is gradually moving to more application-oriented paths, such as urban settings, it has not dealt in large with applications having social networking features. We argue here that current IoT infrastructure, testbeds and related software technologies should be used in such a context, capturing real-world human mobility and social networking interactions, for use in evaluating and fine-tuning realistic mobility models and designing human-centric applications. We discuss a system for producing traces for a new generation of human-centric applications, utilizing technologies such as Bluetooth and focusing on human interactions. We describe the architecture for this system and the respective implementation details presenting two distinct deployments; one in an office environment and another in an exhibition/conference event with 103 active participants combined, thus covering two popular scenarios for human centric applications. Our system provides online, almost real-time, feedback and statistics and its implementation allows for rapid and robust deployment, utilizing mainstream technologies and components. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.