Ubiquitous Information Systems (UBIS): A design research study of intelligent middleware and architecture

Ubiquitous information systems (UBIS) adapt current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between hardware devices and software components in relation to people and process. More recent ubiquitous computing approaches provide the means to link Web content and services to a number of mobile devices (evolving from earlier Palm Computers to more recent smart phones and ambient screens), adapting information to provide mobile business solutions. In general, these approaches focus on providing the means to improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information can be discovered and accessed on-the-fly. This paper explores how a number of investment banking systems can be re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access and uncover more effective architectural models for strategies of this type. A proof-of-concept intelligent middleware Web service is built to further test and explore how human-devices-application connections can be made sporadically and not limited to pre-configured access to specific applications and data

Context-Aware UPnP-AV Services for Adaptive Home Multimedia Systems

Recommended by Harald Kosch One possibility to provide mobile multimedia in domestic multimedia systems is the use of Universal Plug and Play Audio Visual (UPnP-AV) devices. In a standard UPnP-AV scenario, multimedia content provided by a Media Server device is streamed to Media Renderer devices by the initiation of a Control Point. However, there is no provisioning of context-aware multimedia content customization. This paper presents an enhancement of standard UPnP-AV services for home multimedia environments regarding context awareness. It comes up with context profile definitions, shows how this context information can be queried from the Media Renderers, and illustrates how a Control Point can use this information to tailor a media stream from the Media Server to one or more Media Renderers. Moreover, since a standard Control Point implementation only queries one Media Server at a time, there is no global view on the content of all Media Servers in the UPnP-AV network. This paper also presents an approach of multimedia content integration on the Media Server side that provides fast search for content on the network. Finally, a number of performance measurements show the overhead costs of our enhancements to UPnP-AV in order to achieve the benefits

Recent Advances in Wireless Communications and Networks

This book focuses on the current hottest issues from the lowest layers to the upper layers of wireless communication networks and provides "real-time" research progress on these issues. The authors have made every effort to systematically organize the information on these topics to make it easily accessible to readers of any level. This book also maintains the balance between current research results and their theoretical support. In this book, a variety of novel techniques in wireless communications and networks are investigated. The authors attempt to present these topics in detail. Insightful and reader-friendly descriptions are presented to nourish readers of any level, from practicing and knowledgeable communication engineers to beginning or professional researchers. All interested readers can easily find noteworthy materials in much greater detail than in previous publications and in the references cited in these chapters

SLEPX: An Efficient Lightweight Cipher for Visual Protection of Scalable HEVC Extension

This paper proposes a lightweight cipher scheme aimed at the scalable extension of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, referred to as the Scalable HEVC (SHVC) standard. This stream cipher, Symmetric Cipher for Lightweight Encryption based on Permutation and EXlusive OR (SLEPX), applies Selective Encryption (SE) over suitable coding syntax elements in the SHVC layers. This is achieved minimal computational complexity and delay. The algorithm also conserves most SHVC functionalities, i.e. preservation of bit-length, decoder format-compliance, and error resilience. For comparative analysis, results were taken and compared with other state-of-art ciphers i.e. Exclusive-OR (XOR) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The performance of SLEPX is also compared with existing video SE solutions to confirm the efficiency of the adopted scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that SLEPX is as secure as AES in terms of visual protection, while computationally efficient comparable with a basic XOR cipher. Visual quality assessment, security analysis and extensive cryptanalysis (based on numerical values of selected binstrings) also showed the effectiveness of SLEPX’s visual protection scheme for SHVC compared to previously-employed cryptographic technique