Sensor Network based Social Network

Over the fall 2006 semester, undergraduates under the guidance of WNCG members, Sanjay Shakkottai and William Bard, conducted a sensor network based social network experiment. They tagged 50 freshman students with sensor nodes (MICAz motes) over several weeks. When students were in close proximity of each other, their associated sensor nodes exchanged messages containing time-stamp and node ID information. These messages were uploaded to a PC located in the lobby of the ENS building using a sensor base-station (Xbow Stargate node).

Some highlights from the study, that collected about 4000 records include:

1. The student interaction graph looks "heavy-tailed", i.e., a few students interacted with a large fraction, but most students interacted with a small number (a connectivity plot is available in the longer article).
2. The study indicated that in spite of the fact that 16% of the students were of a foreign country origin, only 1.7% of the reported interactions were among students with the same foreign country origin. On the other hand, 39.5% of the interactions took place between a US student and a foreign student.
3. Mean interaction times varied between 5 - 10 minutes depending on gender.

This study was supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Intel research.

Elizabeth A. Bodine received her B.A. in Plan II Honors and her B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin . She focused her studies in the areas of communications and digital signal processing and performed research under the direction of Professors William Bard and Sanjay Shakkottai. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Eta Kappa Nu in 2006 and plans to attend graduate school in electrical engineering in Fall 2007. Miss Bodine currently researches satellite communications and software-defined radios as part of the Advanced Signal Processing Projects group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Vanessa W. Evans is an Undergraduate Research Assistant within WNCG. Over the past year she helped design and implement the wireless sensor network-based social networking experiment. In Spring 2007 she will conduct its second iteration. She is also designing a multi-hop routing protocol, for a small network of motes, using a node-neighbor discovery process. This protocol could be used to determine message-passing routes based on current friend-network statistics. Vanessa will receive her B. S. in Electrical Engineering in the spring of 2007 and plans to attend a graduate program in electrical and computer engineering in the fall.