Experimentation with MANETs of Smartphones

Mobile AdHoc NETworks (MANETs) have been identified as a key emerging technology for scenarios in which IEEE 802.11 or cellular communications are either infeasible, inefficient, or cost-ineffective. Smartphones are the most adequate network nodes in many of these scenarios, but it is not straightforward to build a network with them. We extensively survey existing possibilities to build applications on top of ad-hoc smartphone networks for experimentation purposes, and introduce a taxonomy to classify them. We present AdHocDroid, an Android package that creates an IP-level MANET of (rooted) Android smartphones, and make it publicly available to the community. AdHocDroid supports standard TCP/IP applications, providing real smartphone IEEE 802.11 MANET and the capability to easily change the routing protocol. We tested our framework on several smartphones and a laptop. We validate the MANET running off-the-shelf applications, and reporting on experimental performance evaluation, including network metrics and battery discharge rate.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Reflecting on the technical development of the Mapping Sculpture project

This paper explains, evaluates and reflects on the technical challenges and opportunities that underpin both the Mapping Sculpture project and its mobile interface. It provides insights into the development process as an integral component of the research methodology, and highlights the importance of meaningful collaboration between researchers and software developers. Just as the project questions the conventional notion of the lone sculpture practitioner, so the technical development needed to mirror the complex web of connections between people, places, objects, organizations and events through enabling large-scale, distributed and collaborative research. Enabling access to these rich resources on mobile devices was a further innovative and challenging development, but one that opens up the possibility for fresh modes of access and development of new audiences. The success of this technical development offers a model for representing complex relationships hidden in multiple sources, enabling innovative research and enhancing access

Locational wireless and social media-based surveillance

The number of smartphones and tablets as well as the volume of traffic generated by these devices has been growing constantly over the past decade and this growth is predicted to continue at an increasing rate over the next five years. Numerous native features built into contemporary smart devices enable highly accurate digital fingerprinting techniques. Furthermore, software developers have been taking advantage of locational capabilities of these devices by building applications and social media services that enable convenient sharing of information tied to geographical locations. Mass online sharing resulted in a large volume of locational and personal data being publicly available for extraction. A number of researchers have used this opportunity to design and build tools for a variety of uses – both respectable and nefarious. Furthermore, due to the peculiarities of the IEEE 802.11 specification, wireless-enabled smart devices disclose a number of attributes, which can be observed via passive monitoring. These attributes coupled with the information that can be extracted using social media APIs present an opportunity for research into locational surveillance, device fingerprinting and device user identification techniques. This paper presents an in-progress research study and details the findings to date

MADServer: An Architecture for Opportunistic Mobile Advanced Delivery

Rapid increases in cellular data traffic demand creative alternative delivery vectors for data. Despite the conceptual attractiveness of mobile data offloading, no concrete web server architectures integrate intelligent offloading in a production-ready and easily deployable manner without relying on vast infrastructural changes to carriers’ networks. Delay-tolerant networking technology offers the means to do just this. We introduce MADServer, a novel DTN-based architecture for mobile data offloading that splits web con- tent among multiple independent delivery vectors based on user and data context. It enables intelligent data offload- ing, caching, and querying solutions which can be incorporated in a manner that still satisfies user expectations for timely delivery. At the same time, it allows for users who have poor or expensive connections to the cellular network to leverage multi-hop opportunistic routing to send and receive data. We also present a preliminary implementation of MADServer and provide real-world performance evaluations

Strategies for mlearning integration : evaluating a case study of staging and scaffolding mlearning integration across a three-year bachelor’s degree

This paper outlines the third iteration of integrating mobile web 2.0 within a Bachelors level course. An analysis and comparison of the impact of mobile web 2.0 across all three years of the 2009 course enables the development of implementation strategies that can be used to integrate mlearning into other tertiary courses, and inform the design of further Product Design mlearning integration iterations

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

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