English

Back to the Source: an Online Approach for Sensor Placement and Source Localization

Social and Information Networks 2017-02-07 v2

Abstract

Source localization, the act of finding the originator of a disease or rumor in a network, has become an important problem in sociology and epidemiology. The localization is done using the infection state and time of infection of a few designated sensor nodes; however, maintaining sensors can be very costly in practice. We propose the first online approach to source localization: We deploy a priori only a small number of sensors (which reveal if they are reached by an infection) and then iteratively choose the best location to place new sensors in order to localize the source. This approach allows for source localization with a very small number of sensors; moreover, the source can be found while the epidemic is still ongoing. Our method applies to a general network topology and performs well even with random transmission delays.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1702.01056,
  title  = {Back to the Source: an Online Approach for Sensor Placement and Source Localization},
  author = {Brunella Spinelli and L. Elisa Celis and Patrick Thiran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.01056},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Accepted for presentation at WWW '17

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:08:45.290Z