Tung-Chun Chang: SmartParcels: Cross-Layer IoT Planning for Smart Communities

The emergence of IoT-aided smart communities has created the need for a new set of urban planning tools. The extra design process includes instrumenting infrastructures (sensing, networking, and computing devices) in smartspaces to generate information units (from data analytics) to realize a range of required services. We propose SmartParcels, a framework that generates a comprehensive and cost-effective plan for instrumenting designated regions of smart communities (often called parcels). SmartParcels embeds an approach to solve the cross-layer IoT planning problem (shown to be NP-hard) that must consider applications, information/data, infrastructure, and geophysical layout as interdependent layers in the overall design. We develop a suite of algorithms (optimal, partial optimal, heuristic) for the problem; urban planners can compose these techniques in a plug-and-play manner to achieve performance trade-offs (optimality, timeliness). SmartParcels can be utilized for clean-slate planning (from scratch) or for retrofit of communities with existing smart infrastructure. We evaluate Smart- Parcels in two real-world settings: National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and Irvine in California, USA, for clean-slate and retrofit. The evaluation results reveal that SmartParcels can enable a 2X – 7X improvement in cost/performance metrics as compared to the baseline algorithm in the clean-slate and retrofit cases.

Tung-Chun Chang is a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Distributed Systems Middleware (DSM) group under the supervision of Professor Nalini Venkatasubramanian. His general research interests include the Internet of Things, wireless networking, network analysis, social networks, optimization, and machine learning.