ANGELAH: A Framework for Assisting Elders At Home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both ”elder monitoring and emergency detection” solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed

Prediction assisted fast handovers for seamless IP mobility

Word processed copy.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-98).This research investigates the techniques used to improve the standard Mobile IP handover process and provide proactivity in network mobility management. Numerous fast handover proposals in the literature have recently adopted a cross-layer approach to enhance movement detection functionality and make terminal mobility more seamless. Such fast handover protocols are dependent on an anticipated link-layer trigger or pre-trigger to perform pre-handover service establishment operations. This research identifies the practical difficulties involved in implementing this type of trigger and proposes an alternative solution that integrates the concept of mobility prediction into a reactive fast handover scheme

Architectural and mobility management designs in internet-based infrastructure wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged to be a cost-effective solution to support large-scale wireless Internet access. They have numerous ap- plications, such as broadband Internet access, building automation, and intelligent transportation systems. One research challenge for Internet-based WMNs is to design efficient mobility management techniques for mobile users to achieve seamless roam- ing. Mobility management includes handoff management and location management. The objective of this research is to design new handoff and location management techniques for Internet-based infrastructure WMNs. Handoff management enables a wireless network to maintain active connections as mobile users move into new service areas. Previous solutions on handoff manage- ment in infrastructure WMNs mainly focus on intra-gateway mobility. New handoff issues involved in inter-gateway mobility in WMNs have not been properly addressed. Hence, a new architectural design is proposed to facilitate inter-gateway handoff man- agement in infrastructure WMNs. The proposed architecture is designed to specifi- cally address the special handoff design challenges in Internet-based WMNs. It can facilitate parallel executions of handoffs from multiple layers, in conjunction with a data caching mechanism which guarantees minimum packet loss during handoffs. Based on the proposed architecture, a Quality of Service (QoS) handoff mechanism is also proposed to achieve QoS requirements for both handoff and existing traffic before and after handoffs in the inter-gateway WMN environment. Location management in wireless networks serves the purpose of tracking mobile users and locating them prior to establishing new communications. Existing location management solutions proposed for single-hop wireless networks cannot be directly applied to Internet-based WMNs. Hence, a dynamic location management framework in Internet-based WMNs is proposed that can guarantee the location management performance and also minimize the protocol overhead. In addition, a novel resilient location area design in Internet-based WMNs is also proposed. The formation of the location areas can adapt to the changes of both paging load and service load so that the tradeoff between paging overhead and mobile device power consumption can be balanced, and at the same time, the required QoS performance of existing traffic is maintained. Therefore, together with the proposed handoff management design, efficient mobility management can be realized in Internet-based infrastructure WMNs

Handover in Mobile WiMAX Networks: The State of Art and Research Issues

The next-generation Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks, using the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) as the core technology based on the IEEE 802.16 family of standards, is evolving as a Fourth-Generation (4G) technology. With the recent introduction of mobility management frameworks in the IEEE 802.16e standard, WiMAX is now placed in competition to the existing and forthcoming generations of wireless technologies for providing ubiquitous computing solutions. However, the success of a good mobility framework largely depends on the capability of performing fast and seamless handovers irrespective of the deployed architectural scenario. Now that the IEEE has defined the Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) MAC-layer handover management framework, the Network Working Group (NWG) of the WiMAX Forum is working on the development of the upper layers. However, the path to commercialization of a full-fledged WiMAX mobility framework is full of research challenges. This article focuses on potential handover-related research issues in the existing and future WiMAX mobility framework. A survey of these issues in the MAC, Network and Cross-Layer scenarios is presented along with discussion of the different solutions to those challenges. A comparative study of the proposed solutions, coupled with some insights to the relevant issues, is also included

Business Model Development for a Mobile Context-aware Service

Mobile information services, preceded on tablet computers, smartphones or other mobile devices, are a significant source of information for people nowadays. By including context data, a new category of information services has been established. On the application side, a range of innovative services, providing the user with an added-value, could be observed in the previous years, boosted by the wide-spread adoption of smartphones in developed countries. For the application provider, the question how to configure the business model is crucial: several factors such as the service configuration, the revenue model and the configuration of the value creation network, which all can be seen as decisive factors for success or failure of a service. In this paper we present a context-aware service named \u27Digital Graffiti\u27 and describe the process of the business model development. As an outcome of this process, a specific business model, based on feasibility and future prospect, was chosen and further described

Mobility-Aware Video Streaming in MIMO-Capable Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) is a well-known technique for the exploitation of the spatial multiplexing (MUX) and spatial diversity (DIV) gains that improve transmission quality and reliability. In this paper, we propose a quality-adaptive scheme for handover and forwarding that supports mobile-video-streaming services in MIMO-capable, heterogeneous wireless-access networks such as those for Wi-Fi and LTE. Unlike previous handover schemes, we propose an appropriate metric for the selection of the wireless technology and the MIMO mode, whereby a new address availability and the wireless-channel quality, both of which are in a new wireless-access network so that the handover and video-playing delays are reduced, are considered. While an MN maintains its original care-of address (oCoA), the video packets destined for the MN are forwarded with the MIMO technique (MUX mode or DIV mode) on top of a specific wireless technology from the previous Access Router (pAR) to the new Access Router (nAR) until they finally reach the MN; however, to guarantee a high video-streaming quality and to limit the video-packet-forwarding hops between the pAR and the nAR, the MN creates a new CoA (nCOA) within the delay threshold of the QoS/quality of experience (QoE) satisfaction result, and then, as much as possible, the video packet is forwarded with the MUX. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed scheme is a significant improvement upon the other schemes

Lightweight mobile and wireless systems: technologies, architectures, and services

1Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering (ICSE), University of the Aegean, 81100 Mytilene, Greece 2Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento, 38123 Trento, Italy 3Department of Informatics, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 574 00 Macedonia, Greece 4Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), 08860 Barcelona, Spain 5North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, NC 27695, US