A middleware service for coordinated adaptation of communication services in groups of devices

Abstract—Recent research in pervasive computing has shown that context-awareness and dynamic adaptation are fundamental requirements of mobile distributed applications. However, most approaches that focus on context-aware dynamic adaptation use only the context information available at the mobile device to trigger a local adaptation. However, for distributed collaborative applications this is clearly insufficient, since a same adaptation has to be done, in synch, at all mobile devices of the group, and hence should also be based on a commonly agreed context. Therefore, for such kinds of applications one requires mechanisms and protocols to exchange the context information among the devices and to coordinate of the adaptation operations at a group of mobile device. In this paper we present a middleware service for coordinated adaptation of communication services in groups of devices. At each device this adaptation is achieved with minimal disruption for the application’s remote interactions. This middleware service is based on the notion of global context and a generic protocol for global context election and synchronization of the adaptation steps, which we called Moratus. Our middleware service was implemented using JGroups and evaluated for groups of up to 30 devices, showing acceptable latency for groups of such size. I

Mind your step! : How profiling location reveals your identity - and how you prepare for it

Location-based services (LBS) are services that position your mobile phone to provide some context-based service for you. Some of these services – called ‘location tracking’ applications - need frequent updates of the current position to decide whether a service should be initiated. Thus, internet-based systems will continuously collect and process the location in relationship to a personal context of an identified customer. This paper will present the concept of location as part of a person’s identity. I will conceptualize location in information systems and relate it to concepts like privacy, geographical information systems and surveillance. The talk will present how the knowledge of a person's private life and identity can be enhanced with data mining technologies on location profiles and movement patterns. Finally, some first concepts about protecting location information

Improved battery life for context awareness application in smart-phones

The new smart-phones with new operating system and portable sensors support the basis for context awareness systems and applications for handling user activity and user privacy. Nowadays, individuals need new services and real time information anywhere and anytime. Context awareness is an emerging service, which could be able to improve the user experiences in current situation. Context awareness can be considered as location, calendar, user activity and etc. The review of the literature proves that context awareness in mobile phone can be useful and studied as unavoidable service in next generation of smart-phone applications. In this paper, a short review about context awareness in mobile phone is studied, furthermore, we critically analyzed related works of context awareness in smart-phones. The review shows that the most important context in mobile phone is location, which is mostly obtained by using Global Positioning System (GPS) sensor in mobile phones but GPS can significantly increases battery consumption in mobile phones. In this regard, a framework as Improved Battery life in Context Awareness System (IBCS) is proposed to improve battery life and reduce cost of using GPS in context awareness applications based on smart-phones. The review argues the weakness and strength of these studies, and aims to (a) indicate the most important context in mobile phone, (b) reduce the battery consumption of GPS sensor in mobile phone

Understanding Information Systems Continuance for Information-Oriented Mobile Applications

Consumers’ use of mobile data applications is expected to rise significantly in the next few years. While user acceptance and adoption of mobile applications have received growing interest from IS researchers, only a paucity of studies have focused on user continuance behaviors in the mobile commerce context. Studying the IS continuance behavior of 147 registered users of an information-oriented mobile application, this research extends the general model of IS continuance to include a number of explanatory antecedents: information quality, system quality, process quality, and hedonic value. The enhanced framework makes a significant contribution to the theory of IS continuance intention, and at the same time, it offers implications to mobile service providers for creating high quality mobile applications for consumers

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Enabling Context-Aware Web Services: A Middleware Approach for Ubiquitous Environments

In ubiquitous environments, mobile applications should sense and react to environmental changes to provide a better user experience. In order to deal with these concerns, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) provide a solution allowing applications to interact with the services available in their surroundings. In particular, context-aware Web Services can adapt their behavior considering the user context. However, the limited resources of mobile devices restrict the adaptation degree. Furthermore, the diverse nature of context information makes difficult its retrieval, processing and distribution. To tackle these challenges, we present the CAPPUCINO platform for executing context-aware Web Services in ubiquitous environments. In particular, in this chapter we focus on the middleware part that is built as an autonomic control loop that deals with dynamic adaptation. In this autonomic loop we use FraSCAti, an implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification, as the execution kernel for Web Services. The context distribution is achieved with SPACES, a flexible solution based on REST (REpresentational State Transfer ) principles and benefiting from the COSMOS (COntext entitieS coMpositiOn and Sharing ) context manage- ment framework. The application of our platform is illustrated with a mobile commerce application scenario that combines context-aware Web Services and social networks

AALUMO: a user model ontology for ambient assisted living services supported in next-generation networks

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services are emerging as context-awareness solutions to support elderly people?s autonomy. The context-aware paradigm makes applications more user-adaptive. In this way, context and user models expressed in ontologies are employed by applications to describe user and environment characteristics. The rapid advance of technology allows creating context server to relieve applications of context reasoning techniques. Specifically, the Next Generation Networks (NGN) provides by means of the presence service a framework to manage the current user's state as well as the user's profile information extracted from Internet and mobile context. This paper propose a user modeling ontology for AAL services which can be deployed in a NGN environment with the aim at adapting their functionalities to the elderly's context information and state

Odin: Context-Aware Middleware for Mobile Services

Abstract—Mobile devices such as smart phones are increas-ing permeating society. With strides in computational power, coupled with the ability to connect to other small devices, smart phones are able to host novel services. To address the repetitive problems associated with mobile service development, namely service reachability, scalability and availability, we have developed Odin, which is a middleware platform for mobile service provisioning. Beyond providing a provisioning solution, Odin conserves scarce resources such as network bandwidth and device power supply. However, Odin has previously lacked an ability to take into account operational context. In this paper, we present context-aware extensions to Odin that further optimise resource usage. Augmented with support for context types that include location, performance, power and network, Odin is able to propagate context information to applications and dynamic adapt the middleware’s behaviour. Novelty of the work lies in a solution whose device overhead is very low, and one that offers a coherent approach to context dis-semination and adaptation. Based on quantitative evaluation, context-aware Odin’s low overhead is demonstrated along with significant gains in resource conservation. I

Cloud computing and context-awareness: A study of the adapted user experience

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Today, mobile technology is part of everyday life and activities and the mobile ecosystems are blossoming, with smartphones and tablets being the major growth drivers. The mobile phones are no longer just another device, we rely on their capabilities in work and in private. We look to our mobile phones for timely and updated information and we rely on this being provided any time of any day at any place. Nevertheless, no matter how much you trust and love your mobile phone the quality of the information and the user experience is directly associated with the sources and presentation of information. In this perspective, our activities, interactions and preferences help shape the quality of service, content and products we use. Context-aware systems use such information about end-users as input mechanisms for producing applications based on mobile, location, social, cloud and customized content services. This represents new possibilities for extracting aggregated user-centric information and includes novel sources for context-aware applications. Accordingly, a Design Research based approach has been taken to further investigate the creation, presentation and tailoring of user-centric information. Through user evaluated experiments findings show how multi-dimensional context-aware information can be used to create adaptive solutions tailoring the user experience to the users’ needs. Research findings in this work; highlight possible architectures for integration of cloud computing services in a heterogeneous mobile environment in future context-aware solutions. When it comes to combining context-aware results from local computations with those of cloud based services, the results provide findings that give users tailored and adapted experiences based on the collective efforts of the two

A Lightweight Process Engine for Enabling Advanced Mobile Applications

The widespread dissemination of smart mobile devices offers new perspectives for timely data collection in large-scale scenarios. However, realizing sophisticated mobile data collection applications raises various technical issues like the support of different mobile operating systems and their platform-specific features. Often, specifically tailored mobile applications are implemented in order to meet particular requirements. In this context, changes of the data collection procedure become costly and profound programming skills are needed to adapt the respective mobile application accordingly. To remedy this drawback, we developed a model-driven approach, enabling end-users to create mobile data collection applications themselves. Basis to this approach are elements for flexibly defining sophisticated questionnaires, called instruments, which not only contain information about the data to be collected, but also on how the instrument shall be processed on different mobile operating systems. For the latter purpose, we provide an advanced mobile (kernel) service that is capable of processing the logic of sophisticated instruments on various platforms. The paper discusses fundamental requirements for such a kernel and introduces a generic architecture. The feasibility of this architecture is demonstrated through a prototypical implementation. Altogether, the mobile service allows for the effective use of smart mobile devices in a multitude of different data collection application scenarios (e.g., clinical and psychological trials)