Carbook: A Platform for Mobile Automotive Services

Wireless mobile technologies have triggered a rapid development of secondary network technologies. One such prominent field of technology is interoperability for consumer devices. This field is mostly based on XML and Web Services and it includes technologies such as Universal Plug-and-Play, open media container formats, open codecs and Rich Internet Application technologies for mobile devices. Automotive field has been relatively slow and conservative in embracing these new Internet technologies. This is about to change as European Union and other substantial players are pressing forward with the safety and environmental technologies in cars. These technologies depend heavily on wireless Internet connectivity. As part of this thesis work, I have played a central role in defining the core concept of a distributed framework for mobile automotive services, Carbook System. I have also outlined the first phase of a shared research environment, Carlab, for these kinds of services. Carlab is used to demonstrate different technologies in accordance to Elektrobit’s vision for the future automotive Internet services. Carbook System will be implemented incrementally jointly with the continuation of the Carlab implementation. In this master of science thesis I have mapped and evaluated the essential technologies and created a preliminary outline for Carbook System and a set of services. The first phase Carlab network topology and emulation of different domains in Carbook System are also drafted in this thesis work

Personalised, Context-aware Composition of Pervasive Mobile Services

This paper discusses some of the challenges encountered when using policy-based management to manage pervasive m-Government services. Users within a pervasive computing environment can take advantage of pervasive m-Government services if management of these services is developed and integrated into the environment's management system. The mobility of the user is a key feature of pervasive computing environments. Adapting the management system to account for user's mobility is a challenging and highly active research area. Application of policy based management techniques appears to have the potential to successfully manage the provision of services across multiple management domains, however this potential will only be realised if solutions to a number of challenging research issues are realised. In particular, current policy based management techniques do not fully support user or service mobility across management domains. Thus we argue that research into specific areas, including dynamic policy refinement, dynamic policy conflict detection and resolution, policy interoperability among domains, and inter-domain policy negotiation, must be carried ou

Adapting mobile systems using logical mobility primitives

Mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants and mobile phones, are becoming increasingly popular, smaller, more capable and even fashionable personal items. Combined with the recent advent of wireless networking techniques, users are equipped with mobile devices of significant computational abilities, which are able to wirelessly access information by dynamically connecting to many different networks. Despite the ubiquity of mobile devices, mobile systems are built using monolithic architectures, use a small set of predefined interaction paradigms and do not exploit or adapt to the dynamicity of their local or remote context. Applications deployed on mobile devices face considerable challenges posed by their changing surroundings. One of the main peculiarities of mobile devices is heterogeneity, which may occur in software, hardware and network protocols. Mobile systems may carry a large number of different applications, use different operating systems and middleware and, often, have more than one network interface. A further challenge is their considerable variation in the computational resources available, such as battery power, CPU speed, network bandwidth and volatile and persistent memory. Moreover, mobile computing systems are highly dynamic systems, in terms of their surroundings, implying that the requirements for applications deployed on a mobile device are a moving target. Changes in the requirements (such as integration with a new service) may require changes to the application. Consequently, these changes may mean that the application behaviour needs to adapt. This thesis argues that the potential of the ubiquity of mobile devices cannot be realised using static and monolithic architectures, as mobile systems need to be able to adapt to accommodate changes to their environment. It investigates the use of three technologies to offer adaptation to mobile devices: Logical mobility techniques, component systems and middleware technologies. More specifically, this thesis presents the SATIN (System Adaptation Targeting Integrated Networks) component metamodel, a lightweight local component metamodel that offers the flexible use of logical mobility primitives. The metamodel is instantiated to build the SATIN middleware system, a component-based mobile computing middleware that uses the mobility primitives exported by the metamodel to reconfigure itself and applications running on top of it. The suitability of SATIN for the creation of adaptable mobile systems is demonstrated, by using it to implement and evaluate a number of applications showing different aspects of adaptation. Moreover, existing projects are reengineered to run as SATIN components, showing the flexibility of the approach and the advantages gained over the originals

A framework for safe composition of heterogeneous SOA services in a pervasive computing environment with resource constraints

The Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm, defines services as software artifacts whose implementations are separated from their specifications. Application developers rely on services to simplify the design, reduce the development time and cost. Within the SOC paradigm, different Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been developed. These different SOAs provide platform independence, programming-language independence, defined standards, and network support. Even when different SOAs follow the same SOC principles, in practice it is difficult to compose services from heterogeneous architectures. Automatic the process of composition of services from heterogeneous SOAs is not a trivial task. Current composition tools usually focus on a single SOA, while others do not provide mechanisms for ensuring safety of composite services and their interactions. Given that some services might perform critical operations or manage sensitive data, defining safety for services and checking for compliance is crucial. This work proposes and workflow specification language for composite services that is SOA-independent. It also presents a framework for automatic composition of services of heterogeneous SOAs, supporting web services (WS) and OSGi services as an example. It integrates formal software analysis methods to ensure the safety of composite services and their interactions. Experiments are conducted to study the performance of the composite service generated automatically by the framework with composite services using current composition methods. We use as an example a smart home composite service for the management of medicines, deployed in a regular and in a resource-constrained network environment

Remote service provision for connected homes.

This research study proposed to view a remote service delivery system from three distinct perspectives: connected home environments (user perspective), remote service delivery platform (service enabler), and remote service providers (service provider perspective); to establish a holistic view on the requirements of remote service provision to connected home environments. A reference architecture for remote service provision based on the proposed views has been devised, which provides built-in support for an “On-Demand” operating model and facilitate “Freedom of Choice” via different levels of interoperability

The role of communication systems in smart grids: Architectures, technical solutions and research challenges

The purpose of this survey is to present a critical overview of smart grid concepts, with a special focus on the role that communication, networking and middleware technologies will have in the transformation of existing electric power systems into smart grids. First of all we elaborate on the key technological, economical and societal drivers for the development of smart grids. By adopting a data-centric perspective we present a conceptual model of communication systems for smart grids, and we identify functional components, technologies, network topologies and communication services that are needed to support smart grid communications. Then, we introduce the fundamental research challenges in this field including communication reliability and timeliness, QoS support, data management services, and autonomic behaviors. Finally, we discuss the main solutions proposed in the literature for each of them, and we identify possible future research directions