An architecture for presenting auditory awareness information in pervasive computing environments

Presented at the 12th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), London, UK, June 20-23, 2006.In this paper we present how awareness can be supported in pervasive computing environments through auditory information. We introduce an application which uses soundscapes to support people's awareness of each other's presence in an office environment. We describe several techniques for construction and control of such soundscapes. Finally, we present an architecture for designing and controlling soundscapes. The architecture is based on managers, agents, evaluators, a blackboard information storage, and a control language, it emphasizes reusability and extensibility, and it is built upon a common system framework

Manufacturing equipment data collection framework

Estágio realizado na Qimonda Portugal, S. A. e orientado pelo Eng.º Nuno SoaresTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

A Microservice based Architecture for a Presence Service in the Cloud

Presence service enables sharing of, and a subscription to the end users presence (online or offline) status. Primarily used for instant messaging applications, the presence service now finds its way into innovative solutions for domains such as wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things. The growth in users of instant messaging applications is ever increasing since the advent of social media networks. Presence service needs to be highly scalable to handle growing load of the users. Moreover, the user activity is inherently dynamic in nature which requires the presence service to be highly elastic to utilise resources efficiently. Traditional presence services are built as monoliths. Monolithic architectures by design are difficult to scale, lacks elasticity and are resource inefficient. Moreover, overprovisioning of resources to handle unanticipated loads further adds to resource inefficiency. Cloud computing and microservices are emerging paradigms that can help tackling the challenges above. Cloud computing with three key facets: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enable rapid provisioning and release of resources (e.g. storage, compute, network) on demand. Microservices is an approach of developing applications as a set of smaller, independent, and individually scalable services which communicate with each other using lightweight protocols. The on-demand nature of cloud computing provides a platform to achieve elastic scalability whereas microservices increase the scalability of the architecture. This thesis presents a microservice architecture for a presence service in the cloud. The architecture is based on a state of the art business model. The proposed architecture has three main components: A stateless front-end, a repository and a cache. The front end is built as a set of microservices exposed as SaaS. The front end, to remain technology agnostic, communicates with the repository using the Representational State Transfer (REST) interface. The cache provides fast data access to the front end. The front end microservices use message queues to communicate with each other. Besides, to check the feasibility of the architecture, a proof of concept prototype is implemented for a Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence (SIMPLE) based presence service. Performance measurements have been made for the proposed and traditional architectures. Also, a comparative analysis of the results is done. The analysis of the results shows that the proposed architecture provides the desired scalability and elasticity to the presence service. Moreover, the proposed architecture provides lower response time and higher throughput in comparison to the traditional architecture

Presence Traffic Optimization Techniques

With the growth of presence-based services, it is important to provision the network to support high traffic and load generated by presence services. Presence event distribution systems amplify a single incoming PUBLISH message into possibly numerous outgoing NOTIFY messages from the server. This can increase the network load on inter-domain links and can potentially disrupt other QoS-sensitive applications. In this document, we present existing as well as new techniques that can be used to reduce presence traffic both in inter-domain and intra-domain scenarios. Specifically, we propose two new techniques: sending common NOTIFY for multiple watchers and batched notifications. We also propose some generic heuristics that can be used to reduce network traffic due to presence

SIMPLEstone: Benchmarking Presence Server Performance

Presence is an important enabler for communication in Internet telephony systems. Presence-based services depend on accurate and timely delivery of presence information. Hence, presence systems need to be appropriately dimensioned to meet the growing number of users, varying number of devices as presence sources, the rate at which they update presence information to the network and the rate at which network distributes the user's presence information to the watchers. SIMPLEstone is a set of metrics for benchmarking the performance of presence systems based on SIMPLE. SIMPLEstone benchmarks a presence server by generating requests based on a work load specification. It measures server capacity in terms of request handling capacity as an aggregate of all types of requests as well as individual request types. The benchmark treats different configuration modes in which presence server interoperates with the Session Initiation protocol (SIP) server as one block

SIP presence location service

This paper presents an innovative use of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for the subscription and notification of geographic information in order to provide a privacy concerned location-based service. SIP is a signaling protocol used for establishing sessions in an IP network. It has been widely used for Internet conferencing and telephony. This research project aims to enhance the SIP presence model in order to protect sensitive geographic information. To achieve this goal, we thoroughly analyzed existing Location-Based Services (LBS), reviewed LBS designs’ pitfalls and identified several key privacy requirements. Based on this research, we presented a SIP flow that meets the privacy requirements. This SIP message flow includes SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY and PUBLISH messages. A data format to carry geographic location information has also been introduced. The data format is based on Presence Information Data Format (PIDF). We define it as Location-enhanced PIDF, or LPIDF. LPIDF contains geographical information objects. We hope that the outcome of this research project will provide rich, convenient, privacy concerned architecture for LBS. Because LPIDF is based on SIP, this approach can be easily integrated into IP telephony services. LPIDF enables personalization of the Location-Based services address user privacy concerns and hereby increase their satisfaction.Telkom, Cisco, THRI

SIMPLEstone: Benchmarking Presence Server Performance

Presence is an important enabler for communication in Internet telephony systems. Presence-based services depend on accurate and timely delivery of presence information. Hence, presence systems need to be appropriately dimensioned to meet the growing number of users, varying number of devices as presence sources, the rate at which they update presence information to the network and the rate at which network distributes the user's presence information to the watchers. SIMPLEstone is a set of metrics for benchmarking the performance of presence systems based on SIMPLE. SIMPLEstone benchmarks a presence server by generating requests based on a work load specification. It measures server capacity in terms of request handling capacity as an aggregate of all types of requests as well as individual request types. The benchmark treats different configuration modes in which presence server interoperates with the Session Initiation protocol (SIP) server as one block

Service de présence adapté au contexte des communications d'urgence médicale pré-hospitalière

Notre groupe de recherche développe actuellement une plateforme de communication multimédia sur protocole IP. Cette plateforme vise une application dans le domaine des communications d'urgence médicale pré-hospitalière. Dans un tel contexte, il devient utile de joindre et d'inviter à une conférence multimédia, un spécialiste médical. La problématique que nous abordons est celle de pouvoir joindre, à tout moment, une telle ressource possédant certaines caractéristiques de spécialité et de disponibilité. Pour y répondre, nous suggérons la mise au point d'un service de présence adapté au contexte des communications d'urgence médicale pré-hospitalière. Ce service a la particularité de permettre une recherche de personnel qui répond à des critères spécifiques, tels que la spécialité, la localisation et/ou l'état de présence. L'objectif général de notre projet de recherche est donc de contribuer à l'avancement de la technologie des systèmes de présence en contexte médical