Middleware for Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook

In modern distributed computing, applications are rarely built directly atop operating system facilities, e.g., sockets. Higher-level middleware abstractions and systems are often employed to simplify the programmer’s chore or to achieve interoperability. In contrast, real-world wireless sensor network (WSN) applications are almost always developed by relying directly on the operating system. Why is this the case? Does it make sense to include a middleware layer in the design of WSNs? And, if so, is it the same kind of software system as in traditional distributed computing? What are the fundamental concepts, reasonable assumptions, and key criteria guiding its design? What are the main open research challenges, and the potential pitfalls? Most importantly, is it worth pursuing research in this field? This paper provides a (biased) answer to these and other research questions, preceded by a brief account on the state of the art in the field

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

Data driven wireless network design : a multi-level modeling approach

A

A Gossip-based optimistic replication for efficient delay-sensitive streaming using an interactive middleware support system

While sharing resources the efficiency is substantially degraded as a result of the scarceness of availability of the requested resources in a multiclient support manner. These resources are often aggravated by many factors like the temporal constraints for availability or node flooding by the requested replicated file chunks. Thus replicated file chunks should be efficiently disseminated in order to enable resource availability on-demand by the mobile users. This work considers a cross layered middleware support system for efficient delay-sensitive streaming by using each device's connectivity and social interactions in a cross layered manner. The collaborative streaming is achieved through the epidemically replicated file chunk policy which uses a transition-based approach of a chained model of an infectious disease with susceptible, infected, recovered and death states. The Gossip-based stateful model enforces the mobile nodes whether to host a file chunk or not or, when no longer a chunk is needed, to purge it. The proposed model is thoroughly evaluated through experimental simulation taking measures for the effective throughput Eff as a function of the packet loss parameter in contrast with the effectiveness of the replication Gossip-based policy.Comment: IEEE Systems Journal 201

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Towards low cost prototyping of mobile opportunistic disconnection tolerant networks and systems

Fast emerging mobile edge computing, mobile clouds, Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber physical systems require many novel realistic real time multi-layer algorithms for a wide range of domains, such as intelligent content provision and processing, smart transport, smart manufacturing systems and mobile end user applications. This paper proposes a low cost open source platform, MODiToNeS, which uses commodity hardware to support prototyping and testing of fully distributed multi-layer complex algorithms over real world (or pseudo real) traces. MODiToNeS platform is generic and comprises multiple interfaces that allow real time topology and mobility control, deployment and analysis of different self-organised and self-adaptive routing algorithms, real time content processing, and real time environment sensing with predictive analytics. Our platform also allows rich interactivity with the user. We show deployment and analysis of two vastly different complex networking systems: fault and disconnection aware smart manufacturing sensor network and cognitive privacy for personal clouds. We show that our platform design can integrate both contexts transparently and organically and allows a wide range of analysis