Abstract

There has been growing interest in urban surveillance using 
vehicles that monitor the environment, classify the events,
e.g., license plates, and exchange metadata with neighbors in a
peer-to-peer fashion. The idea is to create a totally 
distributed index of all the events and make it accessible to a
variety of customers. For instance, the Department of
Transportation extracts traffic congestion statistics; the
Department of Health monitors pollutants; the National Guard 
tracks terrorist activities, and; the Police carries out 
forensic accident investigations. Mobile, vehicular sensing
differs significantly from fixed (wireless) sensing. The 
vehicles have no strict limits on battery life, processing 
power and storage capabilities. Moreover they can collect an 
enormous volume of data, making traditional sensor harvesting
solutions inadequate. The paper describes MobEyes, a 
middleware solution that diffuses data summaries to create a 
distributed index of the massive urban data base. We discuss 
the challenges of designing and maintain such a system, from 
information dissemination to harvesting, routing and security.

Bio sketch 

Dr. Gerla received his Engineering degree from the Politecnico 
di Milano, Italy, in 1966 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from 
UCLA in 1970 and 1973. He became IEEE Fellow in 2002. At UCLA,
he was part of a small team that developed the early ARPANET 
protocols under the guidance of Prof. Leonard Kleinrock. He 
worked at Network Analysis Corporation, New York, from 1973 to 
1976, transferring the ARPANET technology to several Government
and Commercial Networks. He joined the Faculty of the Computer 
Science Department at UCLA in 1976, where he is now Professor.
At UCLA he has designed and implemented some of the most 
popular and cited network protocols for ad hoc wireless 
networks including distributed clustering, multicast (ODMRP and 
CODECast) and transport (TCP Westwood) under DARPA and NSF 
grants. He has lead the $12M, 6 year ONR MINUTEMAN project, 
designing the next generation scalable airborne Internet for 
tactical and homeland defense scenarios. He is now leading two 
advanced wireless network projects under ARMY and IBM funding. 
In the commercial network scenario, with NSF and Industry 
sponsorship, he has led the development of vehicular 
communications for safe navigation, urban sensing and location 
awareness. A parallel research activity covers personal P2P 
communications including cooperative, networked medical 
monitoring (see www.cs.ucla.edu/NRL for recent publications).