Smartphone as a Road Sensor

Mark Shtern mark@cse.yorku.ca

York University Adaptive System Research Lab

Negative Factors Impacting the

Driving Experience • Road conditions

• Traffic accidents

– Human factor -> 93%

• Traffic jams

• Parking

– Scarcity

– Locating

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Possible Avenues for Improvement

• Personalized notification

– Traffic conditions

– Road conditions

– Collision avoidance notification

• Intelligent route planners

• Traffic sensors

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Existing Sensors

• Road traffic monitoring

– Cameras, Traffic light, Vehicle Counter, Traffic Speed

• Weather conditions

• Social media

– (?) limited to information about highways

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Wish List…

• Inexpensive maintenance

• Easy for mass-deployment

• Mobile sensor

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Smartphone

• Several built-in sensors

– GPS (Position, Speed)

– Gyroscope

– Accelerometer

– Compass

• Personal device

• Popular device

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Smartphone as a Road Sensor

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•Road conditions assessment •Adaptive route planner •Personalized traffic notification •Collision avoidances notification •Optimization fuel consumption •Parking assistance •Traffic conditions

Challenges (Non-technical)

• User acceptance – Privacy/Trust

• Human interaction – Mobile phones and driving safety

• Data ownership • Regulations

– Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act

– Path planner on local roads

• Accountability

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Challenges (Technical)

• Functional

– High volume of data

– Large number of online users (mobile devices)

– Real-time

– Human interaction

• Non-functional

– Privacy/Security

– Several popular incompatible smart phone models

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Envisioned Smart Transportation Platform

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Features

• Cloud based application server

• Data storage

• Communication – Real-time notification

• Security/Privacy/Trust

• Intelligent content delivery

• Auto-scalable

• Support mobile and desktop users

• RAPID development

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Past Attempt

• AppScale/Google AppEngine

– Frontend

• HTML5 Web Application

– Backend

• Google SQL/MySQL

• AppScale/Google AppEngine

– Real-time

• Socket (HTML5), XMPP

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Past Attempt (continued)

• Advantages – Write once, run anywhere

– Existing technology

– Several traffic applications have developed

– Auto-scalable

• Disadvantages – Limited development model

– Relational database may fail to meet our big data requirements

– Mobile device may not be fully HTML5 compliance

13 http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-trapped-in-mysql-fate-worse-than-death/

Current Attemp

• “Native Mobile App” – Frontend

• JavaScript

• PhoneGap platform (http://phonegap.com/)

– Backend • J2EE

• MangoDB

– Real-time • AJAX, Comet technique

(http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/07/19/real-time-comet-applications-on-node-with-tunguska/)

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“Native Mobile App”

• Advantages – Flexible development model/Enterprise

Application

– MangoDB • Real-time

• Big data/easy scale-out

– Scalable Enabled

– Support for many mobile OSs • iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, WebOS,

Bada and Symbian

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Status

• Development State – Initial implementation

• Map • Data On/Off • Mark bad road • Store data on device • Store data on server

– Collecting data

• Bumps in the road – Power management – Accuracy of collected data – Data interpretation

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Security

• Network

– Sniffing network traffic

– Masquerade (spoofing)

– Denial of Service (DoS)

– Message tampering (session hijacking)

• Privacy

• Access Control

• Auditing

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Privacy and Accountability

• Group Signature – Valid signatures by group members always verify

correctly, and invalid signatures always fail verification

– Given a message and its signature, the identity of the individual signer cannot be determined without the group manager's secret key

– Given two messages and their signatures, we cannot tell if the signatures were from the same signer or not.

18

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_signature

Access Control

• Expressive and flexible policies

• Context- aware model

• Distributed and suitable for big data

• Need-to-share paradigm

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Policy-Based Access Control

• Dynamic nature

• Draws policies and attributes from many Community of Interests (COIs)

• Utilizes extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML)

• Technica’s open source PBAC reference implementation

20

http://www.gosac-n.org/sites/default/files/GOSAC-N%20Whitepaper_v2.0_5.25.11.pdf

Conclusion

– Smartphone as road sensors

– Technical and non-technical challenges

– Conceptual approaches for attacking data collection and security issues

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Acknowledgements

• Prof. Marin Litoiu

• Graduate Students

– Vasileios Theodorou

– Mitch Constantine

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