Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for the development of mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation, since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service development. The architecture hides technology-specific mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses motivations and design details in the challenging context of mobile multimedia streaming applications

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Context-aware Dynamic Discovery and Configuration of 'Things' in Smart Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of Internet-connected objects, such as RFIDs, sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future Internet. Currently, such Internet-connected objects or `things' outnumber both people and computers connected to the Internet and their population is expected to grow to 50 billion in the next 5 to 10 years. To be able to develop IoT applications, such `things' must become dynamically integrated into emerging information networks supported by architecturally scalable and economically feasible Internet service delivery models, such as cloud computing. Achieving such integration through discovery and configuration of `things' is a challenging task. Towards this end, we propose a Context-Aware Dynamic Discovery of {Things} (CADDOT) model. We have developed a tool SmartLink, that is capable of discovering sensors deployed in a particular location despite their heterogeneity. SmartLink helps to establish the direct communication between sensor hardware and cloud-based IoT middleware platforms. We address the challenge of heterogeneity using a plug in architecture. Our prototype tool is developed on an Android platform. Further, we employ the Global Sensor Network (GSN) as the IoT middleware for the proof of concept validation. The significance of the proposed solution is validated using a test-bed that comprises 52 Arduino-based Libelium sensors.Comment: Big Data and Internet of Things: A Roadmap for Smart Environments, Studies in Computational Intelligence book series, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 201

Learning about End-User Development for Smart Homes by "Eating Our Own Dog Food"

SPOK is an End-User Development Environment that permits people to monitor, control, and configure smart home services and devices. SPOK has been deployed for more than 4 months in the homes of 5 project team members for testing and refinement, prior to longitudinal experiments in the homes of families not involved in the project. This article reports on the lessons learned in this initial deployment

Leveraging the Grid to Provide a Global Platform for Ubiquitous Computing Research

The requirement for distributed systems support for Ubicomp has led to the development of numerous platforms, each addressing a subset of the overall requirements of ubiquitous systems. In contrast, many other scientific disciplines have embraced the vision of a global distributed computing platform, i.e. the Grid. We believe that the Grid has the potential to evolve into an ideal platform for building ubiquitous computing applications. In this paper we explore in detail the areas of synergy between Grid computing and ubiquitous computing and highlight a series of research challenges in this space

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

Runtime reconfiguration of physical and virtual pervasive systems

Today, almost everyone comes in contact with smart environments during their everyday’s life. Environments such as smart homes, smart offices, or pervasive classrooms contain a plethora of heterogeneous connected devices and provide diverse services to users. The main goal of such smart environments is to support users during their daily chores and simplify the interaction with the technology. Pervasive Middlewares can be used for a seamless communication between all available devices and by integrating them directly into the environment. Only a few years ago, a user entering a meeting room had to set up, for example, the projector and connect a computer manually or teachers had to distribute files via mail. With the rise of smart environments these tasks can be automated by the system, e.g., upon entering a room, the smartphone automatically connects to a display and the presentation starts. Besides all the advantages of smart environments, they also bring up two major problems. First, while the built-in automatic adaptation of many smart environments is often able to adjust the system in a helpful way, there are situations where the user has something different in mind. In such cases, it can be challenging for unexperienced users to configure the system to their needs. Second, while users are getting increasingly mobile, they still want to use the systems they are accustomed to. As an example, an employee on a business trip wants to join a meeting taking place in a smart meeting room. Thus, smart environments need to be accessible remotely and should provide all users with the same functionalities and user experience. For these reasons, this thesis presents the PerFlow system consisting of three parts. First, the PerFlow Middleware which allows the reconfiguration of a pervasive system during runtime. Second, with the PerFlow Tool unexperi- enced end users are able to create new configurations without having previous knowledge in programming distributed systems. Therefore, a specialized visual scripting language is designed, which allows the creation of rules for the commu- nication between different devices. Third, to offer remote participants the same user experience, the PerFlow Virtual Extension allows the implementation of pervasive applications for virtual environments. After introducing the design for the PerFlow system, the implementation details and an evaluation of the developed prototype is outlined. The evaluation discusses the usability of the system in a real world scenario and the performance implications of the middle- ware evaluated in our own pervasive learning environment, the PerLE testbed. Further, a two stage user study is introduced to analyze the ease of use and the usefulness of the visual scripting tool