MINERVA: Information-Centric Programming for Social Sensing

In this paper, we introduce Minerva; an information-centric programming paradigm and toolkit for social sensing. The toolkit is geared for smartphone applications whose main objective is to collect and share information about the physical world. Information-centric programming refers to a publish-subscribe paradigm that maximizes the amount of information delivered. Unlike a traditional publish-subscribe system where publishers are assumed to have independent content, Minerva is geared for social sensing applications where different sources (participants sharing sensor data) often overlap in information they share. For example, through lack of coordination, they might collect redundant pictures of the same scene or redundant speed measurements of the same street. The main contribution of Minerva, therefore, lies in a data prioritization scheme that maximizes information delivery from publishers to subscribers by reducing redundancy, taking into account the non-independent nature of content. The algorithm is implemented on Android phones on top of the recently introduced named data networking framework. Evaluation results from both two smartphone-based experiments and a large-scale real data driven simulation demonstrate that the prioritization algorithm outperforms other candidates in terms of information coverage.