Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Exploring the Design of Pay-Per-Use Objects in the Construction Domain

Equipment used in the construction domain is often hired in order to reduce cost and maintenance overhead. The cost of hire is dependent on the time period involved and does not take into account the actual use equipment has received. This paper presents our initial investigation into how physical objects augmented with sensing and communication technologies can measure use in order to enable new pay-per-use payment models for equipment hire. We also explore user interaction with pay-per-use objects via mobile devices. The user interactions that take place within our prototype scenario range from simple information access to transactions involving multiple users. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a prototype pay-per-use system motivated by a real world equipment hire scenario. We also provide insights into the various challenges introduced by supporting a pay-per-use model, including data storage and data security in addition to user interaction issues

InfoFilter: Supporting Quality of Service for Fresh Information Delivery

With the explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web comes a dramatic increase in the number of users that compete for the shared resources of distributed system environments. Most implementations of application servers and distributed search software do not distinguish among requests to different web pages. This has the implication that the behavior of application servers is quite unpredictable. Applications that require timely delivery of fresh information consequently suffer the most in such competitive environments. This paper presents a model of quality of service (QoS) and the design of a QoS-enabled information delivery system that implements such a QoS modeL The goal of this development is two-fold. On one hand, we want to enable users or applications to specify the desired quality of service requ.irements for their requests so that application-aware QoS adaptation is supported throughout the Web query and search processing. On the other hand, we want to enable an application server to customize how it shou.ld respond to external requests by setting priorities among query requests and allocating server resources using adaptive QoS control mechanisms. We introduce the Infopipe approach as the systems support architecture and underlying technology for building a QoS-enabled distributed system for fresh information delivery

Managing motion triggered executables in distributed mobile databases

Mobile devices have brought new applications into our daily life. However, ecient man- agement of these objects to support new applications is challenging due to the distributed nature and mobility of mobile objects. This dissertation describes a new type of mobile peer- to-peer (M-P2P) computing, namely geotasking, and presents ecient management of mobile objects to support geotasking. Geotasking mimics human interaction with the physical world. Humans generate information using sensing ability and store information to geographical lo- cations. Humans also retrieve this information from the physical locations. For instance, an installation of a new stop sign at some intersection in town is analogous to an insertion of a new data item into the database. Instead of processing regular data as in traditional data management systems, geotasking manages a collection of geotasks, each dened as a computer program bound to a geographical region. The hardware platform for geotasking consists of popular networked position-aware mobile devices such as cell phones, personal digital assis- tants, and laptops. We design and implement novel system software to facilitate programming and ecient management of geotasks. Such management includes inserts, deletes, updates, retrieval and execution of a geotask triggered by mobile object correlations, geotask mobil- ity, and geotask dependency. Geotasking enables useful applications ranging from warning of dangerous areas for military and search-and-rescue missions to monitoring the population in a certain area for trac management to informing tourists of exciting events in an area and other such applications. Geotasking provides a distributed and unied solution for supporting various types of applications

Privacy, Space and Time: a Survey on Privacy-Preserving Continuous Data Publishing

Sensors, portable devices, and location-based services, generate massive amounts of geo-tagged, and/or location- and user-related data on a daily basis. The manipulation of such data is useful in numerous application domains, e.g., healthcare, intelligent buildings, and traffic monitoring, to name a few. A high percentage of these data carry information of users\u27 activities and other personal details, and thus their manipulation and sharing arise concerns about the privacy of the individuals involved. To enable the secure—from the users\u27 privacy perspective—data sharing, researchers have already proposed various seminal techniques for the protection of users\u27 privacy. However, the continuous fashion in which data are generated nowadays, and the high availability of external sources of information, pose more threats and add extra challenges to the problem. In this survey, we visit the works done on data privacy for continuous data publishing, and report on the proposed solutions, with a special focus on solutions concerning location or geo-referenced data

An approach driven by mobile agents for data management in vehicular networks

In the last years, and thanks to improvements on computing and communications technologies, wireless networks formed by vehicles (called vehicular networks) have emerged as a key topic of interest. In these networks, the vehicles can exchange data by using short-range radio signals in order to get useful information related to traffic conditions, road safety, and other aspects. The availability of different types of sensors can be exploited by the vehicles to measure many parameters from their surroundings. These data can then be shared with other drivers who, on the other side, could also explicitly submit queries to retrieve information available in the network. This can be a challenging task, since the data is scattered among the vehicles belonging to the network and the communication links among them have usually a short life due to their constant movement. In this paper, we use mobile agent technology to help to accomplish these tasks, since mobile agents have a number of features that are very well suited for mobile environments, such as autonomy, mobility, and intelligence. Specifically, we analyze the benefits that mobile agents can bring to vehicular networks and the potential difficulties for their adoption. Moreover, we describe a query processing approach based on the use of mobile agents. We focus on range queries that retrieve interesting information from the vehicles located within a geographic area, and perform an extensive experimental evaluation that shows the feasibility and the interest of the proposal

Continuous Spatial Query Processing:A Survey of Safe Region Based Techniques

In the past decade, positioning system-enabled devices such as smartphones have become most prevalent. This functionality brings the increasing popularity of location-based services in business as well as daily applications such as navigation, targeted advertising, and location-based social networking. Continuous spatial queries serve as a building block for location-based services. As an example, an Uber driver may want to be kept aware of the nearest customers or service stations. Continuous spatial queries require updates to the query result as the query or data objects are moving. This poses challenges to the query efficiency, which is crucial to the user experience of a service. A large number of approaches address this efficiency issue using the concept of safe region . A safe region is a region within which arbitrary movement of an object leaves the query result unchanged. Such a region helps reduce the frequency of query result update and hence improves query efficiency. As a result, safe region-based approaches have been popular for processing various types of continuous spatial queries. Safe regions have interesting theoretical properties and are worth in-depth analysis. We provide a comparative study of safe region-based approaches. We describe how safe regions are computed for different types of continuous spatial queries, showing how they improve query efficiency. We compare the different safe region-based approaches and discuss possible further improvements