Seamless mobility with personal servers

We describe the concept and the taxonomy of personal servers, and their implications in seamless mobility. Personal servers could offer electronic services independently of network availability or quality, provide a greater flexibility in the choice of user access device, and support the key concept of continuous user experience. We describe the organization of mobile and remote personal servers, define three relevant communication modes, and discuss means for users to exploit seamless services on the personal server

Internet security for mobile computing

Mobile devices are now the most dominant computer platform. Every time a mobile web application accesses the internet, the end user’s data is susceptible to malicious attacks. For instance, when paying a bill at a store with NFC mobile payment, navigating through a city operating GPS on a smartphone, or dictating the temperature at a household with a home automation device. These activities seem routine, yet, when vulnerabilities are present they can leave holes for hackers to access bank accounts, pinpoint a user’s recent location, or tell when someone is not at home. The awareness of the end user cannot be trusted. Device vendors and developers must provide safeguards. An ongoing issue is that the present security standards are outdated and were never envisioned with mobile devices in mind. It can be suggested that security is only idling the progress of mobile computing. Still, many application developers and IT professionals do not adopt security standards fast enough to keep up-to-date with known vulnerabilities. The main goals of the next generation of security standards, TLS, will provide developers with greater security efficiency and improved mobile throughput. These proposed capabilities of the TLS protocol will streamline mobile computing into the forefront of security practices. The analysis of this report demonstrates concepts on the direction mobile security, usability, and performance from a development standpoint.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Separation Framework: An Enabler for Cooperative and D2D Communication for Future 5G Networks

Soaring capacity and coverage demands dictate that future cellular networks need to soon migrate towards ultra-dense networks. However, network densification comes with a host of challenges that include compromised energy efficiency, complex interference management, cumbersome mobility management, burdensome signaling overheads and higher backhaul costs. Interestingly, most of the problems, that beleaguer network densification, stem from legacy networks' one common feature i.e., tight coupling between the control and data planes regardless of their degree of heterogeneity and cell density. Consequently, in wake of 5G, control and data planes separation architecture (SARC) has recently been conceived as a promising paradigm that has potential to address most of aforementioned challenges. In this article, we review various proposals that have been presented in literature so far to enable SARC. More specifically, we analyze how and to what degree various SARC proposals address the four main challenges in network densification namely: energy efficiency, system level capacity maximization, interference management and mobility management. We then focus on two salient features of future cellular networks that have not yet been adapted in legacy networks at wide scale and thus remain a hallmark of 5G, i.e., coordinated multipoint (CoMP), and device-to-device (D2D) communications. After providing necessary background on CoMP and D2D, we analyze how SARC can particularly act as a major enabler for CoMP and D2D in context of 5G. This article thus serves as both a tutorial as well as an up to date survey on SARC, CoMP and D2D. Most importantly, the article provides an extensive outlook of challenges and opportunities that lie at the crossroads of these three mutually entangled emerging technologies.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 201

Transport systems analysis : models and data

Funding: This research project has been funded by Spanish R+D Programs, specifcally under Grant PID2020-112967GB-C31.Rapid advancements in new technologies, especially information and communication technologies (ICT), have significantly increased the number of sensors that capture data, namely those embedded in mobile devices. This wealth of data has garnered particular interest in analyzing transport systems, with some researchers arguing that the data alone are sufficient enough to render transport models unnecessary. However, this paper takes a contrary position and holds that models and data are not mutually exclusive but rather depend upon each other. Transport models are built upon established families of optimization and simulation approaches, and their development aligns with the scientific principles of operations research, which involves acquiring knowledge to derive modeling hypotheses. We provide an overview of these modeling principles and their application to transport systems, presenting numerous models that vary according to study objectives and corresponding modeling hypotheses. The data required for building, calibrating, and validating selected models are discussed, along with examples of using data analytics techniques to collect and handle the data supplied by ICT applications. The paper concludes with some comments on current and future trends

Tagging amongst friends: an exploration of social media exchange on mobile devices

Mobile social software tools have great potential in transforming the way users communicate on the move, by augmenting their everyday environment with pertinent information from their online social networks. A fundamental aspect to the success of these tools is in developing an understanding of their emergent real-world use and also the aspirations of users; this thesis focuses on investigating one facet of this: the exchange of social media. To facilitate this investigation, three mobile social tools have been developed for use on locationaware smartphone handsets. The first is an exploratory social game, 'Gophers' that utilises task oriented gameplay, social agents and GSM cell positioning to create an engaging ecosystem in which users create and exchange geotagged social media. Supplementing this is a pair of social awareness and tagging services that integrate with a user's existing online social network; the 'ItchyFeet' service uses GPS positioning to allow the user and their social network peers to collaboratively build a landscape of socially important geotagged locations, which are used as indicators of a user's context on their Facebook profile; likewise 'MobiClouds' revisits this concept by exploring the novel concept of Bluetooth 'people tagging' to facilitate the creation of tags that are more indicative of users' social surroundings. The thesis reports on findings from formal trials of these technologies, using groups of volunteer social network users based around the city of Lincoln, UK, where the incorporation of daily diaries, interviews and automated logging precisely monitored application use. Through analysis of trial data, a guide for designers of future mobile social tools has been devised and the factors that typically influence users when creating tags are identified. The thesis makes a number of further contributions to the area. Firstly, it identifies the natural desire of users to update their status whilst mobile; a practice recently popularised by commercial 'check in' services. It also explores the overarching narratives that developed over time, which formed an integral part of the tagging process and augmented social media with a higher level meaning. Finally, it reveals how social media is affected by the tag positioning method selected and also by personal circumstances, such as the proximity of social peers

Multi Agent Systems

Research on multi-agent systems is enlarging our future technical capabilities as humans and as an intelligent society. During recent years many effective applications have been implemented and are part of our daily life. These applications have agent-based models and methods as an important ingredient. Markets, finance world, robotics, medical technology, social negotiation, video games, big-data science, etc. are some of the branches where the knowledge gained through multi-agent simulations is necessary and where new software engineering tools are continuously created and tested in order to reach an effective technology transfer to impact our lives. This book brings together researchers working in several fields that cover the techniques, the challenges and the applications of multi-agent systems in a wide variety of aspects related to learning algorithms for different devices such as vehicles, robots and drones, computational optimization to reach a more efficient energy distribution in power grids and the use of social networks and decision strategies applied to the smart learning and education environments in emergent countries. We hope that this book can be useful and become a guide or reference to an audience interested in the developments and applications of multi-agent systems