Hybrid mobile positioning managment framework based on radio communication and global positioning approaches

Mobile devices location systems for remote objects (vehicle, person, commodity, etc.), such as RTLS (Real Time Location System) in general and AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location) particularly for vehicles and persons, are increasingly used today by several enterprises. Indeed, this facilitates the management of personal, products, increases productivity, and so on. These systems use positioning devices such as GPS and communication devices to send remote location data. The first constraint of GPS is that it does not provide a precise position at any time. The extensions of GPS such as WAAS systems and A-GPS, that improve the precision, have also other constraints (availability and cost). The second constraint comes when sending remote location data. Often, the communication devices used for this purpose are GSM modules that send data on the GSM network. The use of GSM network is expensive to send data periodically. To overcome these drawbacks (improve precision and send data with minimum cost), we propose a framework on hybrid mobile devices management system to create a reliable and optimal location system by: i) coupling the radio devices at low integration cost with GPS devices, ii) allowing different mobile objects to cooperate and deliver the positioning data to the remote server

AmbientDB: P2P Data Management Middleware for Ambient Intelligence

The future generation of consumer electronics devices is envisioned to provide automatic cooperation between devices and run applications that are sensitive to people's likings, personalized to their requirements, anticipatory of their behavior and responsive to their presence. We see this `Ambient Intelligence' as a key feature of future pervasive computing. We focus here on one of the challenges in realizing this vision: information management. This entails integrating, querying, synchronizing and evolving structured data, on a heterogeneous and ad-hoc collection of (mobile) devices. Rather than hard-coding data management functionality in each individual application, we argue for adding highlevel data management functionalities to the distributed middleware layer. Our AmbientDB P2P database management system addresses this by providing a global database abstraction over an ad-hoc network of heterogeneous peers

Automated Code Management for Service Oriented Computing in Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks are dynamic environments where fre-quent disconnections and transient interactions lead to de-coupled computing. Typically, participants in an ad hoc network are small mobile devices such as PDAs or cellu-lar phones that have a limited amount of resources avail-able locally, and must leverage the resources on other co-located devices to provide the user with a richer set of func-tionalities. Service-oriented computing (SOC), an emerging paradigm that seeks to establish a standard way of mak-ing resources and capabilities available for use by others in the form of services, is a useful model for engineering soft-ware that seeks to exploit capabilities on remote devices. This paper proposes an automatic code management sys-tem supporting SOC in ad hoc networks. The system is re-sponsible for ensuring that the binary code required to use a service on a remote machine is available on the local host only when required. To support this functionality, a local code base is maintained by discovering and installing code from remote hosts. Since the system is specifically designed for ad hoc networks, it incorporates additional features that help it withstand the inherent dynamism of the network. We present an architecture for our system supporting automatic code management and follow it with a discussion of a Java-based implementation

FEW : file management for portable devices

Comunicação apresentada ao International Workshop on Software Support for Portable Storage (IWSSPS), San Francisco, 2005.In recent years, an increasing number of portable devices with large amounts of storage have become widely used. In this paper, we present the early design of the FEW system, a system that aims to ease file management in the new mobile environment. To this end, the system will manage file replicas stored in fixed and portable storage devices. It will provide an automatic mechanism to establish new file replicas by analyzing file system activity. The system will automatically and incrementally synchronize all file replicas exploring the available network connectivity and the availability of portable storage devices. To merge concurrent updates, operational transformation techniques will be used.FCT/MCES POSI/FEDER - Project #59064/2004

A Methodology for Engineering Collaborative and ad-hoc Mobile Applications using SyD Middleware

Today’s web applications are more collaborative and utilize standard and ubiquitous Internet protocols. We have earlier developed System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware to rapidly develop and deploy collaborative applications over heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices hosting web objects. In this paper, we present the software engineering methodology for developing SyD-enabled web applications and illustrate it through a case study on two representative applications: (i) a calendar of meeting application, which is a collaborative application and (ii) a travel application which is an ad-hoc collaborative application. SyD-enabled web objects allow us to create a collaborative application rapidly with limited coding effort. In this case study, the modular software architecture allowed us to hide the inherent heterogeneity among devices, data stores, and networks by presenting a uniform and persistent object view of mobile objects interacting through XML/SOAP requests and responses. The performance results we obtained show that the application scales well as we increase the group size and adapts well within the constraints of mobile devices

Modelling mobile health systems: an application of augmented MDA for the extended healthcare enterprise

Mobile health systems can extend the enterprise computing system of the healthcare provider by bringing services to the patient any time and anywhere. We propose a model-driven design and development methodology for the development of the m-health components in such extended enterprise computing systems. The methodology applies a model-driven design and development approach augmented with formal validation and verification to address quality and correctness and to support model transformation. Recent work on modelling applications from the healthcare domain is reported. One objective of this work is to explore and elaborate the proposed methodology. At the University of Twente we are developing m-health systems based on Body Area Networks (BANs). One specialization of the generic BAN is the health BAN, which incorporates a set of devices and associated software components to provide some set of health-related services. A patient will have a personalized instance of the health BAN customized to their current set of needs. A health professional interacts with their\ud patients¿ BANs via a BAN Professional System. The set of deployed BANs are supported by a server. We refer to this distributed system as the BAN System. The BAN system extends the enterprise computing system of the healthcare provider. Development of such systems requires a sound software engineering approach and this is what we explore with the new methodology. The methodology is illustrated with reference to recent modelling activities targeted at real implementations. In the context of the Awareness project BAN implementations will be trialled in a number of clinical settings including epilepsy management and management of chronic pain

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed