The sensing systems that monitor physical environments rely on communication infrastructures (wired or wireless) to collect data from the sensors embedded in the environment. However, in many urban environments pre-existing communication infrastructures are not available, and installing new infrastructures is unjustifiably expensive and/or technically infeasible. For such environments, we envis...

Finite strict gammoids, introduced in the early 1970’s, are matroids defined via finite digraphs equipped with some set of sinks: a set of vertices is independent if it admits a linkage to these sinks. In particular, an independent set is maximal (i.e. a base) precisely if it is linkable onto the sinks. In the infinite setting, this characterization of the maximal independent sets need not hold...

This study explores heat diffusion effects inmicro-channel heat sinks intended for electronic cooling applications. Detailed analytical models are constructed for heat sinks havingmicro-channels with rectangular, inverse trapezoidal, triangular, trapezoidal, anddiamond-shaped cross sections. Solutions are presented for both monolithic heat sinks and heat sinks with perfectly insulating cover pl...

Wireless sensor networks generally have three kinds of objects: sensor nodes, sinks, and users that send queries and receive data via the sinks. In addition, the user and the sinks are mostly connected to each other by infrastructure networks. The users, however, should receive the data from the sinks through multi-hop communications between disseminating sensor nodes if such users move into th...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) generally have a many-to-one structure so that event information flows from sensors to a unique sink. In recent WSN applications, many-to-many structures evolved due to the need for conveying collected event information to multiple sinks. Privacy preserved data collection models in the literature do not solve the problems of WSN applications in which network has ...

Terrestrial vegetation sinks have entered the Kyoto Protocol as offsets for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but ocean sinks have escaped attention. Ocean sinks are as unexplored and uncertain as were the terrestrial sinks at the time of negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol. It is not unlikely that certain countries will advocate the inclusion of ocean carbon sinks to reduce their emission ...

In k-anycasting, a sensor wants to report event information to any k sinks in the network. In this paper, we describe KanGuRou, the first position-based energy efficient k-anycast routing which guarantees the packet delivery to k sinks as long as the connected component that contains s also contains at least k sinks. A node s running KanGuRou first computes a tree including k sinks with weight ...

Due to the inherent discrete nature of sensing, interpolation is a key activity in sensing. Interpolation in urban computing faces an unprecedented inference issue that was not present in large scale traditional sensing environments. Obstacles such as buildings and walls are prevalent in urban sensing, and it is important to consider them in urban sensing interpolation. This paper introduces an...