Navjack: Using Discarded Smartphones to Sneak Into Cars (Complete)
Ubiquitous personal vehicles are the ideal platform for deploying city-scale sensor networks, providing available power, good spatial coverage, and predictable quasi-stationary mobility patterns. The challenge is figuring out how to get inside the cars operated by thousands of people in an urban area. We are exploring a novel way of doing so by hijacking personal navigation devices based on discarded smartphones to create a large-scale sensing platform which we call Navjack.
When the vehicle is on, the Navjack unit guides the user to their destination and offers vehicle monitoring capabilities. While the vehicle is off—which is most of the time—the Navjack unit acts as a stationary sensing platform transmitting data from its own sensors and other sensors deployed on the vehicle. Once deployed, we will evaluate the Navjack approach by comparing its coverage and cost with other alternatives and address the problem of ensuring good spatial coverage by and optimizing sensor queries over quasi-stationary Navjack sensor networks.