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

Using the Co-design Process to Build Non-designer Ability in Making Visual Thinking Tools

This research is a case study of using co-design as a way of assisting the capacity building process for an Indianapolis-based community organizer. The community organizer seeks to develop a visual thinking tool for enhancing her engagement with community participants. Community organizers face a wide array of complicated challenges, addressing these kinds of challenges and social issues calls for innovative and inclusive approaches to community problem solving. The author hopes this case study will showcase itself as an example of leveraging design thinking and visual thinking to support and equip more first-line workers who are non-designers to do their community jobs with a more creative problem-solving approach

Designing a Framework to Handle Context Information

In the recent years, a number of context-aware frameworks have been proposed to facilitate the development of context-aware applications. From the experience gained, in this paper we explore the design principles that contextaware platforms should conform to, the functionalities they have to provide and the technologies and tools that can be used for their implementation. Subsequently, we propose a context-aware framework and describe the architecture it adopts, making our own technological selection from the options previously identified

C-Arc: A Novel Architecture for Next Generation Context- Aware Systems

Computing is becoming increasingly mobile and ubiquitous. This implies that applications and services must be aware and adapt to highly dynamic environments. However, building contextaware mobile services is currently a complex and time consuming task. The emergence of truly ubiquitous computing, enabled by the availability of mobile and heterogeneous devices and an increasing number of commercial off-the-shelf sensing technologies, is hampered by the lack of standard architectural support for the development of context-aware systems. In this paper, the common architecture principles of context-aware systems are presented and the crucial contextaware architecture issues to support the next generation context-aware systems which will enable seamless service provisioning in heterogeneous, dynamically varying computing and communication environments are identified and discussed. Furthermore, a novel architecture, CArc,is proposed to aid in the development of the next generation context-aware systems. A prototype implemented of C-Arc is also presented to demonstrate the architecture. C-Arc provides support for most of the tasks involved in dealing with context, namely acquiring context from various sources, interpreting context and disseminating context.Keywords: Context-aware architecture, context-aware systems, context-aware mobile services,mobile and ubiquitous computing

Tracing the Scenarios in Scenario-Based Product Design: a study to support scenario generation

Scenario-based design originates from the human-computer interaction and\ud software engineering disciplines, and continues to be adapted for product development. Product development differs from software development in the former’s more varied context of use, broader characteristics of users and more tangible solutions. The possible use of scenarios in product design is therefore broader and more challenging. Existing design methods that involve scenarios can be employed in many different stages of the product design process. However, there is no proficient overview that discusses a\ud scenario-based product design process in its full extent. The purposes of creating scenarios and the evolution of scenarios from their original design data are often not obvious, although the results from using scenarios are clearly visible. Therefore, this paper proposes to classify possible scenario uses with their purpose, characteristics and supporting design methods. The classification makes explicit different types of scenarios and their relation to one another. Furthermore, novel scenario uses can be referred or added to the classification to develop it in parallel with the scenario-based design\ud practice. Eventually, a scenario-based product design process could take inspiration for creating scenarios from the classification because it provides detailed characteristics of the scenario

Designing appliances for mobile commerce and retailtainment

In the emerging world of the new consumer and the `anytime, anywhere' mobile commerce, appliances are located at the collision point of the retailer and consumer agendas. The consequence of this is twofold: on the one hand appliances that were previously considered plain and utilitarian become entertainment devices and on the other, for the effective design of consumer appliances it becomes paramount to employ multidisciplinary expertise. In this paper, we discuss consumer perceptions of a retailtainment commerce system developed in collaboration between interactivity designers, information systems engineers, hardware and application developers, marketing strategists, product development teams, social scientists and retail professionals. We discuss the approached employed for the design of the consumer experience and its implications for appliance design