Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

DIAMOnDS - DIstributed Agents for MObile & Dynamic Services

Distributed Services Architecture with support for mobile agents between services, offer significantly improved communication and computational flexibility. The uses of agents allow execution of complex operations that involve large amounts of data to be processed effectively using distributed resources. The prototype system Distributed Agents for Mobile and Dynamic Services (DIAMOnDS), allows a service to send agents on its behalf, to other services, to perform data manipulation and processing. Agents have been implemented as mobile services that are discovered using the Jini Lookup mechanism and used by other services for task management and communication. Agents provide proxies for interaction with other services as well as specific GUI to monitor and control the agent activity. Thus agents acting on behalf of one service cooperate with other services to carry out a job, providing inter-operation of loosely coupled services in a semi-autonomous way. Remote file system access functionality has been incorporated by the agent framework and allows services to dynamically share and browse the file system resources of hosts, running the services. Generic database access functionality has been implemented in the mobile agent framework that allows performing complex data mining and processing operations efficiently in distributed system. A basic data searching agent is also implemented that performs a query based search in a file system. The testing of the framework was carried out on WAN by moving Connectivity Test agents between AgentStations in CERN, Switzerland and NUST, Pakistan.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, CHEP03, La Jolla, California, March 24-28, 200

A Middleware for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects everyday objects including a vast array of sensors, actuators, and smart devices, referred to as things to the Internet, in an intelligent and pervasive fashion. This connectivity gives rise to the possibility of using the tracking capabilities of things to impinge on the location privacy of users. Most of the existing management and location privacy protection solutions do not consider the low-cost and low-power requirements of things, or, they do not account for the heterogeneity, scalability, or autonomy of communications supported in the IoT. Moreover, these traditional solutions do not consider the case where a user wishes to control the granularity of the disclosed information based on the context of their use (e.g. based on the time or the current location of the user). To fill this gap, a middleware, referred to as the Internet of Things Management Platform (IoT-MP) is proposed in this paper.Comment: 20 pages, International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC) Vol.8, No.2, March 201

A QoS monitoring system in a heterogeneous multi-domain DVB-H platform

The MobileTV, IPTV, and DVB standards (DVB-H/T) have been defined to offer mobile users interactive multimedia services with quality of service (QoS) consistency analogous to TV services. However, the market has yet to provide effective and economical solutions for the real-time delivery of such services to the corresponding transmitters over multi-domain IP networks. The monitoring system proposed in this paper enables the QoS in the IP networks involved in the delivery of real-time multimedia content to the transmitters to be ascertained. The system utilizes the QoS parameters defined in MPEG-2 Transport Streams to detect problems occurring in the heterogeneous multi-domain IP networks. The ability to detect problems having an adverse effect on QoS allows appropriate control actions to be determined to recover the QoS across the composite IP network. The design and implementation of the proposed QoS-Monitoring system (QoS-MS) is presented, followed by analysis of experimental results that demonstrate the feasibility of the system

Integration of a Canine Agent in a Wireless Sensor Network for Information Gathering in Search and Rescue Missions

Search and rescue operations in the context of emergency response to human or natural disasters have the major goal of finding potential victims in the shortest possible time. Multi-agent teams, which can include specialized human respondents, robots and canine units, complement the strengths and weaknesses of each agent, like all-terrain mobility or capability to locate human beings. However, efficient coordination of heterogeneous agents requires specific means to locate the agents, and to provide them with the information they require to complete their mission. The major contribution of this work is an application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to gather information from a multi-agent team and to make it available to the rest of the agents while keeping coverage. In particular, a canine agent has been equipped with a mobile node installed on a harness, providing information about the dog’s location as well as gas levels. The configuration of the mobile node allows for flexible arrangement of the system, being able to integrate static as well as mobile nodes. The gathered information is available at an external database, so that the rest of the agents and the control center can use it in real time. The proposed scheme has been tested in realistic scenarios during search and rescue exercises

Delivering knowledge in the field: A telecommunications service provision and maintenance case

This paper proposes a novel approach to providing knowledge management services in a business process wherein field engineers are the main process actors, providing and maintaining telecommunications services. Cooperating multi-agents play a central role for the provision of knowledge management services by integrating heterogeneous systems to collect related knowledge for the execution of mobile tasks. The proposed system is expected to increase both the performance of the mobile workforce and customer satisfaction by supporting and encouraging knowledge sharing