NeTS Medium: New Technologies for Next-generation Infrastructural Tagged Systems
                                                                               

 

Project Goals

RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are becoming ubiquitously available as they make their way into retail products, library books, debit cards, passports, driver licenses, car plates, medical devices, etc. The current application model treats tags simply as ID carriers and deals with each tag individually for the purpose of identifying the object that the tag is attached to. The uniqueness of this project is to change the traditional individual view to a collective view that treats universally-deployed tags as a new wireless infrastructure, on which novel applications can be developed for large-scale automated warehouse management, cyber-physical data collection, sophisticated inventory control, and even transportation traffic monitoring on the streets of a city. This newly available infrastructure can be further enhanced by integrating miniaturized sensors into tags for real-time information collection, by exploiting the mobility of tags, by supporting security functions, etc. These developments will greatly expand not only the scope of applications but also fundamental research into the next-generation infrastructural tagged systems.

The project has three major goals.

(1) Treating a tagged system as a pervasive, wireless infrastructure (instead of just individual tags) will open up an extensive list of interesting research problems that underlie many useful applications. Many of these problems have never been studied before. Our first goal is to take a holistic approach to investigate various research problems emerged from infrastructural tagged systems as a whole, identify the intrinsic connections among these seemly different problems, and abstract their solutions into a small set of well-defined fundamental primitives to be implemented by next-generation tags.

(2) Most existing RFID research focuses on improving time efficiency. This is fine for short-range passive tags. An infrastructural system often covers a large area and involves a large number of tags. In this case, battery-powered active tags are preferred for longer transmission ranges and richer on-tag hardware for more sophisticated functions. Energy efficiency becomes a primary concern because it determines the tags' lifetime before they have to be recharged. Our second goal is to design energy-time-efficient solutions for infrastructural tagged systems and investigate new methods for controlling the tradeoff between an application's execution time and its energy cost.

(3) Should future tags be pervasively deployed, people's privacy would become a serious concern. Will they betray our whereabout if we carry them in our pockets or by our cars? While infrastructural tagged systems provide a powerful platform for collecting statistics, we want to do so without tracking each individual tag carrier or causing other privacy violation. Our third goal is to study privacy-preserving information collection in infrastructural tagged systems.

Funding Agency: National Science Foundation

PI: Dr. Shigang Chen, Co-PI: Yuguang Fang

Graduate Students:  Min Chen, Yawei Pang, Yan Qiao, Chi Zhang, Lan Zhang, Yian Zhou, Youlin Zhang, Dimitgrios Melissourgos

Project Duration: 08/01/2014 - 10/31/2018

Publication

  1. Qingjun Xiao, Min Chen, Shigang Chen, Yian Zhou, Temporally or Spatially Dispersed Joint RFID Estimation Using Snapshots of Variable Lengths, in Proceedings of ACM Mobihoc, HongZhou, China, June 2015. (Acceptance ratio: 14.8%)

  2. Jia Liu, Bin Xiao, Shigang Chen, Feng Zhu, Li-jun Chen, Fast RFID Grouping Protocol, in Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, Hongkong, China, April/May, 2015. (Acceptance ratio: 19%)

  3. Yian Zhou, Shigang Chen, Zhen Mo, Qingjun Xiao, Point-to-Point Traffic Volume Measurement through Variable-Length Bit Array Masking in Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems, in Proceedings of IEEE ICDCS, Columbus, Ohio, June 2015. (Acceptance ratio: 12.9%)

  4. Hao Yue, Chi Zhang, Miao Pan, Yuguang Fang, Shigang Chen, Unknown-target Information Collection Protocol in Sensor-enabled RFID Systems, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 22, issue 4, pp. 1164 - 1175, August 2014.

  5. Wen Luo, Yan Qiao, Shigang Chen, Tao Li, Missing-Tag Detection and Energy-Time Tradeoff in Large-Scale RFID Systems with Unreliable Channels, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 22, issue 4, pp. 1079 - 1091, August 2014.

  6. Yan Qiao, Shigang Chen, Tao Li, Shiping Chen, Tag-ordering Polling Protocols in RFID Systems, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 24, issue 3, pp. 1548-1561, June 2016.

  7. Yian Zhou, Zhen Mo, Qingjun Xiao, Shigang Chen, Yafeng Ying, Privacy-Preserving Transportation Traffic Measurement in Intelligent Cyber-Physical Road Systems, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technologies, vol. 65, issue 5, pp. 3749-3759, May 2016.

  8. Min Chen, Wen Luo, Zhen Mo, Shigang Chen, Yuguang Fang, An Efficient Tag Search Protocol in Large-Scale RFID Systems with Noisy Channel, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 24, issue 2, pp. 703-716, April 2016.

  9. Wen Luo, Yan Qiao, Shigang Chen, Min Chen, An Efficient Protocol for RFID Multigroup Threshold-based Classification Based on Sampling and Logical Bitmap, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 397-407, February, 2016.  

  10. Min Chen, Jia Liu, Shigang Chen, Qingjun Xiao, Efficient Anonymous Category-level Joint Tag Estimation, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Singapore, November 2016. (Acceptance rate: 20%)

  11. Jia Liu, Youlin Zhang, Min Chen, Shigang Chen, Lijun Chen, Collision-resistant Communication Model for Stateless Networked Tags, 2-page poster paper, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Singapore, November 2016.

  12. Qingjun Xiao; Shigang Chen, Min Chen, Joint Property Estimation for Multiple RFID Tag Sets Using Snapshots of Variable Lengths, in Proc. of ACM MobiHoc, Paderborn, Germany, 2016. (Acceptance rate: 18.6%)

  13. Min Chen, Jia Liu, Shigang Chen, Qingjun Xiao, Anonymous Category-level Joint Tag Estimation (Extended Abstract), in Proc. of ACM MobiHoc, Paderborn, Germany, 2016.

  14. Min Chen, Shigang Chen, ETAP: Enable Lightweight Anonymous RFID Authentication with O(1) Overhead, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), San Francisco, November 2015. (Acceptance rate: 20%)

  15. Min Chen, Shigang Chen, Identifying State-free Networked Tags, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), San Francisco, November 2015. (Acceptance rate: 20%)

  16. Min Chen, Shigang Chen, RFID Technologies for Internet of Things, Springer, ISBN 978-3-319-47355-0, 2016.

  17. Min Chen, Shigang Chen, You Zhou, Youlin Zhang, Identifying State-free Networked Tags, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 25, issue 3, 2017.  

  18. Qingjun Xiao, Bin Xiao, Shigang Chen, Jiming Chen, Collision-aware Churn Estimation in Large-Scale Dynamic RFID Systems, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 25, issue 1, pp. 392-405, 2017.

  19. Jianqing Liu, Haichuan Ding, Ying Cai, Hao Yue, Yuguang Fang, Shigang Chen, An Energy-Efficient Strategy for Secondary Users in Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks for Green Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Series on Green Communications and Networking, vol. 34, issue 12, pp. 3195 - 3207, December 2016.

  20. Jia Liu, Bin Xiao, Min Chen, Feng Zhu, Shigang Chen, Lijun Chen, Efficient RFID Grouping Protocols, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 24, issue 5, pp. 3177-3190, October 2016.

  21. Y. Gong, L. Wei, Y. Guo, C. Zhang and Y.  Fang, Optimal task recommendation for mobile crowdsourcing with privacy control, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol.3, no.5, pp.745-756, October 2016.

  22. Jia Liu, Shigang Chen, Bin Xiao, Yanyan Wang, Lijun Chen, Category Information Collection in RFID Systems, in Proc. of IEEE ICDCS, 6 pages short paper, Atlanta, GA, USA, June 2017.

  23. He Huang, Yu-e Sun, Shigang Chen, Hongli Xu, Yian Zhou, Persistent Traffic Measurement Through Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communications, Proc. of IEEE ICDCS, Atlanta, GA, USA, June 2017. (Acceptance rate: 16.9%)

  24. Jia Liu, Min Chen, Shigang Chen, Qingfeng Pan, Li-jun Chen, Tag-Compass: Determining the Spatial Direction of an Object with Small Dimensions, Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, Atlanta, GA, USA, May 2017. (Acceptance rate: 20.9%)

  25. Min Chen, Jia Liu, Shigang Chen, Yan Qiao, Yuanqing Zheng, DBF: A General Framework for Anomaly Detection in RFID Systems, Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, Atlanta, GA, USA, May 2017. (Acceptance rate: 20.9%)

  26. Qingjun Xiao, Shigang Chen, Min Chen, Yian Zhou, Zhiping Cai, Adaptive Joint Estimation Protocol for Arbitrary Pair of Tag Sets in a Distributed RFID System, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 25, issue 5, pp. 2670-2685, October 2017.

  27. Min Chen, Shigang Chen, Yuguang Fang, Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocols for RFID Systems, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 25, issue 3, pp. 1475-1488, June 2017.

  28. Youlin Zhang, Shigang Chen, You Zhou, Olufemi Odegbile, Missing-Tag Detection With Presence of Unknown Tags, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON), Hongkong, China, June 2018.

  29. Youlin Zhang, Shigang Chen, You Zhou, Yuguang Fang, Anonymous Temporal-Spatial Joint Estimation at Category Level over Multiple Tag Sets, Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, Honolulu, HI, USA, April 2018.

  30. He Huang, Yu-e Sun, Shigang Chen, Hongli Xu, Yian Zhou, Persistent Traffic Measurement Through Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communications, Proc. of IEEE ICDCS, Atlanta, GA, USA, June 2017. (Acceptance rate: 16.9%)

  31. Youlin Zhang,Shigang Chen, You Zhou, Yuguang Fang, Using Wireless Tags to Monitor Bodily Oscillation, in Proc. of 15th International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), Chengdu, China, October 2018.

  32. Yawei Pang, Haichuan Ding, Jianqing Liu, Yuguang Fang, Shigang Chen, A UHF RFID based System for Children Tracking, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 5, issue 6, pp. 5055-5064, December 2018.

  33. Youlin Zhang, Shigang Chen, You Zhou, Yuguang Fang, Chen Qian, Monitoring Bodily Oscillation with RFID Tags, accepted by IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

  34. Youlin Zhang, Shigang Chen, You Zhou, Yuguang Fang, Missing-Tag Detection With Unknown Tags, under review by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

  35. Youlin Zhang, Shigang Chen, You Zhou, Olufemi Odegbile, Yuguang Fang, Efficient Anonymous Temporal-Spatial Joint Estimation at Category Level over Multiple Tag Sets With Unreliable Channels, under major revision, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

  36. Jia Liu, Shigang Chen, Min Chen, Qingjun Xiao, Lijun Chen, Pose Sensing with a Single RFID Tag, under major review by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.