Transparent resource sharing framework for internet services on handheld devices

Handheld devices have limited processing power and a short battery lifetime. As a result, computationally intensive applications cannot run appropriately or cause the device to run out of battery too early. Additionally, Internet-based service providers targeting these mobile devices lack information to estimate the remaining battery autonomy and have no view on the availability of idle resources in the neighborhood of the handheld device. These battery-related issues create an opportunity for Internet providers to broaden their role and start managing energy aspects of battery-driven mobile devices inside the home. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware resource-sharing framework that enables Internet access providers to delegate (a part of) a client application from a handheld device to idle resources in the LAN, in a transparent way for the end-user. The key component is the resource sharing service, hosted on the LAN gateway, which can be remotely queried and managed by the Internet access provider. The service includes a battery model to predict the remaining battery lifetime. We describe the concept of resource-sharing-as-a-service that allows users of handheld devices to subscribe to the resource sharing service. In a proof-of-concept, we evaluate the delay to offload a client application to an idle computer and study the impact on battery autonomy as a function of the CPU cycles that can be offloaded

Securing openHAB Smart Home Through User Authentication and Authorization

Asjade Internet ehk värkvõrk on dünaamiline ja heterogeenne keskkond, kus asjad koguvad erinevate ülesannete täitmiseks keskkonnast andmeid. Värkvõrgu rakendusvaldkondades nagu näiteks tark kodu kasutatakse harilikult operatsioonide täitmisel kasutaja privaatandmeid. Kui sellised rakendused on turvamata võrkudele avatud, muutub turvalisus oluliseks probleemiks. OpenHAB on OSGi-põhine automatiseerimistarkvara, mis koondab kodukeskkonna seadmete andmeid. OpenHAB ei tee kasutajatele ligipääsu reguleerimismehhanismide kasutamist kohustuslikuks ning sõltub seega täielikult juhtmevaba võrgu turvalisusest. Käesolevas lõputöös uurisime ning arendasime JSON Web Token’i-põhist tõendi autenturit Eclipse SmartHome platvormile, millel põhineb ka openHAB. Tõendi autentur on baasiks ligipääsu reguleerimismehhanismile. Lisaks esitleme kasutatavat volitusmudelit, mis võimaldab hallata kasutajate ligipääsuõigusi asjadele. Saavutatud tulemused osutavad, et ligipääsu reguleerimismehhanismide rakendamine servlet-ide ja REST ressursside jaoks openHABi arhitektuuris on teostatav.The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic and heterogenous environment where Things gather data from the real world to perform various tasks. Applications in IoT, such as the smart home, typically use private data derived from its users for its operations. Security becomes a concern when these applications are exposed to insecure networks. OpenHAB is an OSGi-based automation software that integrates the data from devices at home. OpenHAB does not enforce any access control mechanism for its users, and depends solely on the security of the wireless network. In this work, we studied and implemented a JSON Web Token-based authenticator for Eclipse SmartHome, the core of openHAB, as a base for access control mechanisms. Furthermore, we propose a fine-grained, yet usable authorization model to manage access permissions to things among legitimate users. The results obtained show that it is feasible to enforce access control mechanisms for servlet and REST resources in the architecture of openHAB

Design and development of a context sensitive rural development software application for eService provisioning

After more than a decade since South Africa realized the importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the role it can play to deliver services, the country is still confronted by a number of challenges challenges that hinder the implementation of a fully-fledged ICT-based system in a form of electronic government to better deliver services and information. While rural development remains as one of the country’s greatest concerns, ICT is among approaches and perspectives that are recognized for not only accelerating rural development but also for providing the country’s economic growth. This research was set to investigate approaches to implement ICT solutions for rural development and service provisioning in the context of electronic government. The research focused more on the technical skills to implement such ICT systems for the benefit of rural development and e-government stakeholders that have an interest in design and development of an integrated and interoperable solution to accelerate service delivery, especially in rural communities. A mixed methods approach was used throughout the research accompanied by an evolutionary prototyping to development the desired prototype. A study was then conducted to gain an understanding of the state and the needs of rural communities to date. The results of the study yielded a number of urbanized service providers that rural dwellers need to timeously visit to consume services. Scenarios to design and develop the intended prototypes were then drawn from these results. The overall implementation of the prototypes produced an integrated platform that allows multiple disparate systems to communicate, share and use information. The qualities of the prototype are what this research recommends to relevant to stakeholders in order to implement an integrated and interoperable e-government system that elevates rural development programs and service delivery

An Internet of Things approach for managing smart services provided by wearable devices.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at a fast pace with new devices getting connected all the time. A new emerging group of these devices are the wearable devices, and Wireless Sensor Networks are a good way to integrate them in the IoT concept and bring new experiences to the daily life activities. In this paper we present an everyday life application involving a WSN as the base of a novel context-awareness sports scenario where physiological parameters are measured and sent to the WSN by wearable devices. Applications with several hardware components introduce the problem of heterogeneity in the network. In order to integrate different hardware platforms and to introduce a service-oriented semantic middleware solution into a single application, we propose the use of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as a bridge for guaranteeing interoperability and integration of the different environments, thus introducing a semantic added value needed in the world of IoT-based systems. This approach places all the data acquired (e.g., via Internet data access) at application developers disposal, opening the system to new user applications. The user can then access the data through a wide variety of devices (smartphones, tablets, computers) and Operating Systems (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, etc.)

Multiservice Home Gateways: Business Model, Execution Environment, Management Infrastructure

International audienceThe home gateway market is undergoing deep changes. On one side, home networks are evolving, getting dynamic and federating more and more devices. On the WAN side, new actors appear, such as multimedia content providers. From both sides emerge new features and new management needs. In this article we highlight challenges and benefits of moving more intelligence to the home gateway, making it more than a simple interconnection device. We argue that we need a full-fledged execution environment on gateways to address the evolution of business models. We present this evolution and summarize existing solutions for execution environments and management for home gateways. Then we propose two improvements that reflect the new requirements. The first improvement is a high-level virtualization of service gateways, and the second one recommends an end-to-end dynamic multiprovider management system

Transparent resource sharing framework for Internet services on handheld devices

Abstract Handheld devices have limited processing power and a short battery lifetime. As a result, computational intensive applications can not run appropriately or cause the device to run out-of-battery too early. Additionally, Internet-based service providers targeting these mobile devices lack information to estimate the remaining battery autonomy and have no view on the availability of idle resources in the neighborhood of the handheld device. In this paper, we propose a transparent resource sharing framework that enables service providers to delegate (a part of) a client application from a handheld device to idle resources in the LAN the device is connected to. The key component is the Resource Sharing service, hosted on the LAN gateway, which can be queried by Internet-based service providers. The service includes a battery model to predict the remaining battery lifetime. We describe the concept of Resource-Sharingas-a-Service that allows users of handheld devices to subscribe to the Resource Sharing service. In a proof-of-concept, we evaluate the delay to offload a client application to an idle computer and study the impact on battery autonomy as a function of the CPU cycles that can be offloaded

Platform as a service gateway for the Fog of Things

Internet of Things (IoT), one of the key research topics in recent years, together with concepts from Fog Computing, brings rapid advancements in Smart City, Monitoring Systems, industrial control, transportation and other fields. These applications require a reconfigurable sensor architecture that can span multiple scenarios, devices and use cases that allow storage, networking and computational resources to be efficiently used on the edge of the network. There are a number of platforms and gateway architectures that have been proposed to manage these components and enable application deployment. These approaches lack horizontal integration between multiple providers as well as higher order functionalities like load balancing and clustering. This is partly due to the strongly coupled nature of the deployed applications, a lack of abstraction of device communication layers as well as a lock-in for communication protocols. This is a major obstacle for the development of a protocol agnostic application environment that allows for single application to be migrated and to work with multiple peripheral devices with varying protocols from different local gateways. This research looks at existing platforms and their shortcomings as well as proposes a messaging based modular gateway platform that enables clustering of gateways and the abstraction of peripheral communication protocols. This allows applications to send and receive messages regardless of their location and destination device protocol, creating a more uniform development environment. Furthermore, it results in a more streamlined application development and testing while providing more efficient use of the gateways resources. Our evaluation of a prototype for the system shows the need for the migration of resources and the QoS advantages of such a system. The presented use-case scenarios show that clustering can prove to be an advantage in certain use-cases as well as the deployment of a larger testing and control environment through the platform

Plataforma de serviços residenciais

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesO serviço de acesso à Internet tem sido, até agora, o principal catalisador para a difusão das chamadas ligações de banda larga junto do mercado residencial. O desejo de partilhar este serviço entre vários terminais da mesma residência, aliado a factores como a maturidade do protocolo IP, o aparecimento de tecnologias de rede que permitem a comunicação entre dispositivos em espaços reduzidos, a generalização de conteúdos multimédia em formato digital, entre outros, tem impulsionado o aparecimento das chamadas redes residenciais. Para além de interligarem entre si os mais variados tipos de dispositivos domésticos, estas redes asseguram ainda a comunicação destes mesmos dispositivos com entidades externas à residência. Existe, portanto agora a oportunidade para operadores de telecomunicações e provedores de serviços utilizarem a largura de banda disponível para disponibilizarem, através de uma única plataforma, toda uma nova geração de serviços a clientes residenciais. No entanto, garantir o correcto comportamento de todos estes novos serviços, lidar com as particularidades do ambiente residencial e do próprio utilizador residencial, impõe a operadores e provedores de serviços novos desafios. Um dos principais desafios prende-se com a capacidade das actuais redes de acesso e domésticas para o transporte de vários tipos de serviços. Desta forma, na presente dissertação, são analisados cenários típicos de prestação de serviços residenciais, com ênfase nas infra estruturas de rede que suportam essa mesma prestação de serviços. Nesta, são também caracterizadas infra-estruturas de rede capazes de suportar a distribuição de um leque alargado de serviços residenciais, garantindo o correcto comportamento dos mesmos. A distribuição de vários tipos de serviços sobre infra-estruturas de rede partilhadas, requer também soluções que contemplem a configuração/gestão remota dos vários tipos de serviços e de mecanismos que possibilitem a auto configuração de dispositivos que residem na rede doméstica. Neste contexto a plataforma de serviços OSGi é apresentada. Por forma a concluir-se acerca da sua validade e aplicabilidade em cenários futuros de prestação de serviços residenciais, foi implementado um serviço de monitorização médica remota sobre a mesma. Esta, permitiu principalmente avaliar vantagens e desvantagens da plataforma OSGi, bem como indicar possíveis soluções que colmatam as desvantagens encontradas. Esta dissertação apresenta portanto possíveis soluções para desafios com que operadores e prestadores de serviços se deparam em cenários de prestação de múltiplos tipos de serviços residenciais. ABSTRACT: Internet access service has been, until now, the main reason to the current generalization of the so called broadband connections in the residential market. The will of sharing this same service between different terminals in the same house, together with other factors like the maturity of the IP protocol, the eruption of network technologies that allow the communication between devices in restricted environments, the generalization of multimedia contents distributed in a digital format, among others, has driven to the appearance of the so called residential networks. Besides providing the interconnection between the several types of residential devices, these networks also assure the communication of those same devices with entities outside the home. So this is the opportunity for telecommunications operators and service providers to use the available bandwidth to provide, using a single service platform, new kinds of services to residential costumers. Although, to assure the correct behaviour of that multitude of services, to deal with the uniqueness of the residential environment and of the residential user himself, challenges must be solved by operators and service providers. One of the main challenges as to do with the ability of today's access and residential networks to transport different kinds of services. This way, in the present thesis, typical residential service providing scenarios are analyzed, with special detail on the network infra structures used on that same scenarios. Moreover, network infra structures that support the distribution of different kinds of residential services are also characterized, always considering that the expected behaviour of those same services is assured. The distribution of different types of services over shared networks, also requires solutions regarding the configuration/remote management of those same services, as well mechanisms that allow the auto configuration of domestic devices. In this context, the OSGi service platform is presented. In order to conclude about it's validity and applicability in future service providing scenarios, a remote medical monitoring service was implemented over OSGi. This implementation allowed mainly to judge the advantages and disadvantages of the OSGi platform, as well pointing some possible solutions that somehow minimize the disadvantages. Therefore, this thesis presents possible solutions for challenges that operators and service providers will face in scenarios where is intended to provide to residential costumers a multitude of kinds of services

Uma solução de implantação auto-adaptativa para plataformas Android

Orientador: Cecília Mary Fischer RubiraDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Os dispositivos móveis, hoje em dia, fornecem recursos semelhantes aos de um computador pessoal de uma década atrás, permitindo o desenvolvimento de aplicações complexas. Consequentemente, essas aplicações móveis podem exigir tolerar falhas em tempo de execução. No entanto, a maioria das aplicações móveis de hoje são implantados usando configurações estáticas, tornando difícil tolerar falhas durante a sua execução. Nós propomos uma infraestrutura de implantação auto-adaptativa para lidar com este problema. A nossa solução oferece um circuito autônomo que administra o modelo de configuração atual da aplicação usando um modelo de características dinâmico associado com o modelo arquitetônico da mesma. Em tempo de execução, de acordo com a seleção dinâmica de características, o modelo arquitetônico implantado na plataforma se re-configura para fornecer uma nova solução. Uma aplicação Android foi implementada utilizando a solução proposta, e durante sua execução, a disponibilidade de serviços foi alterada, de tal forma que sua configuração corrente foi dinamicamente alterada para tolerar a indisponibilidade dos serviçosAbstract: Mobile devices, nowadays, provide similar capabilities as a personal computer of a decade ago, allowing the development of complex applications. Consequently, these mobile applications may require tolerating failures at runtime. However, most of the today¿s mobile applications are deployed using static configurations, making difficult to tolerate failure during their execution. We propose an adaptive deployment infrastructure to deal with this problem. Our solution offers an autonomic loop that manages the current configuration model of the application using a dynamic feature model associated with the architectural model. During runtime, according to the dynamic feature selection, the deployed architectural model can be modified to provide a new deployment solution. An Android application was implemented using the proposed solution, and during its execution, the services availability was altered so that its current configuration was changed dynamically in order to tolerate the unavailability of servicesMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação131830/2013-9CNP