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

Analysis of key aspects to manage Wireless Sensor Networks in Ambient Assisted Living environments

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based on ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 will be key enablers of non-invasive, highly sensitive infrastructures to support the provision of future ambient assisted living services. This paper addresses the main design concerns and requirements when conceiving ambient care systems (ACS), frameworks to provide remote monitoring, emergency detection, activity logging and personal notifications dispatching services. In particular, the paper describes the design of an ACS built on top of a WSN composed of Crossbow's MICAz devices, external sensors and PDAs enabled with ZigBee technology. The middleware is integrated in an OSGi framework that processes the acquired information to provide ambient services and also enables smart network control. From our experience, we consider that in a future, the combination of ZigBee technology together with a service oriented architecture may be a versatile approach to AAL services offering, both from the technical and business points of view

An Overview of Centralised Middleware Components for Sensor Networks

Sensors are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives: motion detection, lighting control, environmental monitoring, and keeping track of energy consumption all rely on sensors. Combining data from this wide variety of sensors will result in new and innovative applications. However, access to these sensors – or the networks formed by them – is often provided via proprietary protocols and data formats, thereby obstructing the development of applications. To overcome such issues, middleware components have been employed to provide a universal interface to the sensor networks, hiding vendor-specific details from application developers. The scientific literature contains many descriptions of middleware components for sensor networks, with ideas from various fields of research. Recently, much attention in literature is aimed at what we, in this paper, define as ‘centralised’ middleware components. These components consider sensor networks that have no capacity – in terms of memory, data storage, and cpu power – to run middleware components (partially) on the sensor nodes. Often, viewed from the position of the middleware component, these sensor networks function as simple data providers for applications In this paper we introduce the term ‘centralised’ for such middleware components, guided by a literature review of existing middleware components for sensor networks. We describe their general architecture, give a description of a representative set of four centralised middleware components, and discuss advantages and disadvantages of these components. Finally, we identify directions of further research that will impact centralised middleware systems in the near future

IF-MANET: Interoperable framework for heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

The advances in low power micro-processors, wireless networks and embedded systems have raised the need to utilize the significant resources of mobile devices. These devices for example, smart phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and sensors are gaining enormous processing power, storage capacity and wireless bandwidth. In addition, the advancement in wireless mobile technology has created a new communication paradigm via which a wireless network can be created without any priori infrastructure called mobile ad hoc network (MANET). While progress is being made towards improving the efficiencies of mobile devices and reliability of wireless mobile networks, the mobile technology is continuously facing the challenges of un-predictable disconnections, dynamic mobility and the heterogeneity of routing protocols. Hence, the traditional wired, wireless routing protocols are not suitable for MANET due to its unique dynamic ad hoc nature. Due to the reason, the research community has developed and is busy developing protocols for routing in MANET to cope with the challenges of MANET. However, there are no single generic ad hoc routing protocols available so far, which can address all the basic challenges of MANET as mentioned before. Thus this diverse range of ever growing routing protocols has created barriers for mobile nodes of different MANET taxonomies to intercommunicate and hence wasting a huge amount of valuable resources. To provide interaction between heterogeneous MANETs, the routing protocols require conversion of packets, meta-model and their behavioural capabilities. Here, the fundamental challenge is to understand the packet level message format, meta-model and behaviour of different routing protocols, which are significantly different for different MANET Taxonomies. To overcome the above mentioned issues, this thesis proposes an Interoperable Framework for heterogeneous MANETs called IF-MANET. The framework hides the complexities of heterogeneous routing protocols and provides a homogeneous layer for seamless communication between these routing protocols. The framework creates a unique Ontology for MANET routing protocols and a Message Translator to semantically compare the packets and generates the missing fields using the rules defined in the Ontology. Hence, the translation between an existing as well as newly arriving routing protocols will be achieved dynamically and on-the-fly. To discover a route for the delivery of packets across heterogeneous MANET taxonomies, the IF-MANET creates a special Gateway node to provide cluster based inter-domain routing. The IF-MANET framework can be used to develop different middleware applications. For example: Mobile grid computing that could potentially utilise huge amounts of aggregated data collected from heterogeneous mobile devices. Disaster & crises management applications can be created to provide on-the-fly infrastructure-less emergency communication across organisations by utilising different MANET taxonomies

Development of Wi-Fi based home energy monitoring system for green internet of things

Green Internet of things (IoT) has been heralded as the “next big thing” waiting to be realized in energy-efficient ubiquitous computing. Green IoT revolves around increased machine-to-machine communications and encompasses energy-efficient wireless embedded sensors and actuators that assist in monitoring and controlling home appliances. Energy efficiency in home applications can be achieved by better monitoring of the specific energy consumption by the appliances. There are many wireless standards that can be adopted for the design of such embedded devices in IoT. These communication technologies cater to different requirements and are classified as the short-range and long-range ones. To select the best communication method, this paper surveys various IoT communication technologies and discusses the advantages and disadvantages to develop an energy monitoring system. An IoT device based on the Wi-Fi technology system is developed and tested for usage in the home energy monitoring environment. The performance of this system is then evaluated by the measurement of power consumption metrics. In the efficient deep-sleep mode, the system saves up to 0.3 W per cycle with an average power dissipation of less than 0.1 W/s. Index Terms Energy efficiency, energy monitoring, Internet of things

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications