Evaluating the development of wearable devices, personal data assistants and the use of other mobile devices in further and higher education institutions

This report presents technical evaluation and case studies of the use of wearable and mobile computing mobile devices in further and higher education. The first section provides technical evaluation of the current state of the art in wearable and mobile technologies and reviews several innovative wearable products that have been developed in recent years. The second section examines three scenarios for further and higher education where wearable and mobile devices are currently being used. The three scenarios include: (i) the delivery of lectures over mobile devices, (ii) the augmentation of the physical campus with a virtual and mobile component, and (iii) the use of PDAs and mobile devices in field studies. The first scenario explores the use of web lectures including an evaluation of IBM's Web Lecture Services and 3Com's learning assistant. The second scenario explores models for a campus without walls evaluating the Handsprings to Learning projects at East Carolina University and ActiveCampus at the University of California San Diego . The third scenario explores the use of wearable and mobile devices for field trips examining San Francisco Exploratorium's tool for capturing museum visits and the Cybertracker field computer. The third section of the report explores the uses and purposes for wearable and mobile devices in tertiary education, identifying key trends and issues to be considered when piloting the use of these devices in educational contexts

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Cloud Based Application Development for Accessing Restaurant Information on Mobile Device using LBS

Over the past couple of years, the extent of the services provided on the mobile devices has increased rapidly. A special class of service among them is the Location Based Service(LBS) which depends on the geographical position of the user to provide services to the end users. However, a mobile device is still resource constrained, and some applications usually demand more resources than a mobile device can a ord. To alleviate this, a mobile device should get resources from an external source. One of such sources is cloud computing platforms. We can predict that the mobile area will take on a boom with the advent of this new concept. The aim of this paper is to exchange messages between user and location service provider in mobile device accessing the cloud by minimizing cost, data storage and processing power. Our main goal is to provide dynamic location-based service and increase the information retrieve accuracy especially on the limited mobile screen by accessing cloud application. In this paper we present location based restaurant information retrieval system and we have developed our application in Android.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

Implementing Operations Support Systems in E-Health Based Systems

Information and communication technologies have been introduced in different dimensions of the health care. e-Health is the use of advanced communications technologies such as the Internet, portable, wireless and other sophisticated devices to support health care delivery and education. It has the potentials of improving the efficiency of health care delivery globally. With the increasing demand for information at the point of care, health care providers could explore the advances provided by mobile technologies and the increasing capabilities, compactness and pervasiveness of computing devices to adopt operations supports systems (OSS) in e-Health based systems in order to provide efficient services and enhance their performances. In this paper, we present, the development and implementation of operations supports in e- Health based systems. The system promises to deliver greater productivity for health care practitioner

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Privacy in crowdsourcing:a systematic review

The advent of crowdsourcing has brought with it multiple privacy challenges. For example, essential monitoring activities, while necessary and unavoidable, also potentially compromise contributor privacy. We conducted an extensive literature review of the research related to the privacy aspects of crowdsourcing. Our investigation revealed interesting gender differences and also differences in terms of individual perceptions. We conclude by suggesting a number of future research directions.</p