Collaboration of mobile and pervasive devices for embedded networked systems

Embedded Networked Systems (ENS) consist of various devices, which are embedded into physical objects (e.g., home appliances, vehicles, buidlings, people). With rapid advances in processing and networking technologies, these devices can be fully connected and pervasive in the environment. The devices can interact with the physical world, collaborate to share resources, and provide context-aware services. This dissertation focuses on collaboration in ENS to provide smart services. However, there are several challenges because the system must be - scalable to a huge number of devices; robust against noise, loss and failure; and secure despite communicating with strangers. To address these challenges, first, the dissertation focuses on designing a mobile gateway called Mobile Edge Computing Device (MECD) for Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN), a type of ENS. In order to reduce communication overhead with the server, an MECD is designed to provide local and distributed management of a network and data associated with a moving object (e.g., a person, car, pet). Furthermore, it supports collaboration with neighboring MECDs. The MECD is developed and tested for monitoring containers during shipment from Singapore to Taiwan and reachability to the remote server was a problem because of variance in connectivity (caused by high temperature variance) and high interference. The unreachability problem is addressed by using a mesh networking approach for collaboration of MECDs in sending data to a server. A hierarchical architecture is proposed in this regard to provide multi-level collaboration using dynamic mesh networks of MECDs at one layer. The mesh network is evaluated for an intelligent container scenario and results show complete connectivity with the server for temperature range from 25°C to 65°C. Finally, the authentication of mobile and pervasive devices in ENS for secure collaboration is investigated. This is a challenging problem because mutually unknown devices must be verified without knowledge of each other's identity. A self-organizing region-based authentication technique is proposed that uses environmental sound to autonomously verify if two devices are within the same region. The experimental results show sound could accurately authenticate devices within a small region.