Wearable learning tools

In life people must learn whenever and wherever they experience something new. Until recently computing technology could not support such a notion, the constraints of size, power and cost kept computers under the classroom table, in the office or in the home. Recent advances in miniaturization have led to a growing field of research in ‘wearable’ computing. This paper looks at how such technologies can enhance computer‐mediated communications, with a focus upon collaborative working for learning. An experimental system, MetaPark, is discussed, which explores communications, data retrieval and recording, and navigation techniques within and across real and virtual environments. In order to realize the MetaPark concept, an underlying network architecture is described that supports the required communication model between static and mobile users. This infrastructure, the MUON framework, is offered as a solution to provide a seamless service that tracks user location, interfaces to contextual awareness agents, and provides transparent network service switching

Modeling Dew Computing in DISSECT-CF-Fog

Fog computing provides an effective solution to various problems by extending the cloud’s functionality to typically more limited computing units closer to user devices. Fog computing can provide a higher level of user experience due to its geographic and network topology location and distribution. IoT services also need to be managed seamlessly to ensure adequate QoS (due to the mobility of devices or the temporary periods without an internet connection). Such domains are combined under the auspices of Dew computing, as in critical cases, extending an IoT service to the end user’s device is a feasible task. Such scenarios can hardly be investigated at a large scale due to the lack of dedicated simulation environments. In this paper, we present an extension of the DISSECT-CF-Fog simulator with a Dew computing model, to enable the simulation of IoT-Dew-Fog systems in a cost-effective manner. In particular, we focus on service migration options for mobile devices and cases with temporary internet access limitations. Finally, we performed measurements of real-world use cases with the extended simulator as an evaluation. Our simulation results show that the proposed proactive strategy reduces the processing time of IoT data, exploiting an IoT-Dew-Fog environment

Analyzation Of The Scalability Problems Of Distributed Presence Server Architectures

A mobile presence service is an important factor of social network services in cloud computing environments. The key function of a mobile presence service is to maintain an up-to-date list of presence information of all mobile users. The presence information includes details about a mobile user’s location, availability, activity, device capability and preferences. The service must also connect the user’s ID to his/her current presence information as well as regain and subscribe to changes in the presence information of the user’s friends. We suggest competent and scalable server architecture, called Presence Cloud which facilitates mobile presence services to hold up large-scale social network applications. When a mobile user joins a network Presence Cloud searches for the presence of his/her friends and notifies them of his/her arrival. Presence Cloud categorizes presence servers into a quorum-based server-to-server architecture for efficient presence searching

Tour navigation: a cloud based Tourist Navigation System

Google and Apple have provided precise navigation and locating service in outdoor environment. Tourists in New Zealand are able to identify their current location on a map and use navigation services provided by smartphones with Global Positioning Systems (GPS). However Google Map and IOS Map cannot provide navigation and locating service in indoor environments as the GPS signal is blocked within building interior. This thesis proposes a system to provide convenient and efficient tour navigation service to smartphone users no matter they are indoors or outdoors. In order to provide this service, this thesis implements back-end server on the Cloud Computing platform Google App Engine to calculate the navigation path for mobile users when indoors. Elastic cloud computing platform makes the system efficient at handling considerable number of requests while maintenance costs of the system are affordable. In addition, the mobile application Tour Navigation is developed as the interface between users and cloud service. By the clever use of QR codes with Tour Navigation, users are able to know their current location and query the shortest path to destination by sending requests to the cloud server. This thesis presents the NZ Tour Navigation System which is an affordable and easily-implemented technical solution for indoor navigation. What is more, it proves that the cloud computing platform is able to be the robust server for mobile applications, capable of handling complicated computing tasks

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

A general purpose programming framework for ubiquitous computing environments

It is important to note that the need to support ad-hoc and potentially mobile arrangements of devices in ubiquitous environments does not fit well within the traditional client/server architecture. We believe peer-to-peer communication offers a preferable alternative due to its decentralised nature, removing dependence on individual nodes. However, this choice adds to the complexity of the developers task. In this paper, we describe a two-tiered approach to address this problem: A lower tier employing peer-to-peer interactions for managing the network infrastructure and an upper tier providing a mobile agent based programming framework. The result is a general purpose framework for developing ubiquitous applications and services, where the underlying complexity is hidden from the developer. This paper discusses our on-going work; presenting our design decisions, features supported by our framework, and some of the challenges still to be addressed in a complex programming environment

SpaceSemantics: an architecture for modeling environments

The notion of modeling location is fundamental to location awareness in ubiquitous computing environments. The investigation of models and the integration with the myriad of location sensing technologies makes for a challenging discipline. Despite notable development of location models, we believe that many challenges remain unresolved. Complexity and scalability, diverse environments coupled with various sensors and managing the privacy and security of sensitive information are open issues. In this paper we discuss our previous experience combining location sensing with mobile agents and how the lessons learnt have lead to the conception of SpaceSemantics, an open architecture for modeling environments

Mobile object location discovery in unpredictable environments

Emerging mobile and ubiquitous computing environments present hard challenges to software engineering. The use of mobile code has been suggested as a natural fit for simplifing software development for these environments. However, the task of discovering mobile code location becomes a problem in unpredictable environments when using existing strategies, designed with fixed and relatively stable networks in mind. This paper introduces AMOS, a mobile code platform augmented with a structured overlay network. We demonstrate how the location discovery strategy of AMOS has better reliability and scalability properties than existing approaches, with minimal communication overhead. Finally, we demonstrate how AMOS can provide autonomous distribution of effort fairly throughout a network using probabilistic methods that requires no global knowledge of host capabilities