Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Analysis of pervasive mobile ad hoc routing protocols

Pervasive computing (also referred to as ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence) aims to create environments where computers are invisibly and seamlessly integrated and connected into our everyday environment. Pervasive computing and intelligent multimedia technologies are becoming increasingly important, although many potential applications have not yet been fully realized. These key technologies are creating a multimedia revolution that will have significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, and governmental domains. This useful volume provides up-to-date and state-of-the-art coverage of the diverse topics related to pervasive computing and intelligent multimedia technologies. The use of different computational intelligence-based approaches to various problems in pervasive computing are examined, including video streaming, intelligent behavior modeling and control for mobile manipulators, tele-gaming, indexing video summaries for quick video browsing, web service processes, virtual environments, ambient intelligence, and prevention and detection of attacks to ubiquitous databases. Topics and features: -Includes a comprehensive overview, providing a thorough literature review and an outline of the important research challenges -Discusses pervasive computing approaches in the context of intelligent multimedia -Examines virtual reality technology, mobile virtual environments, and the potential use of intelligent multimedia and ubiquitous computing in the hotels of the future -Describes various approaches in ambient intelligence for home health care for the elderly and those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, for volcano monitoring, and for preventing attacks to ubiquitous databases Investigates issues in web services and situation awareness in pervasive computing environments -Explores wireless network applications, such as mobile agents and e-commerce

Ubiquitous Computing for Mobile Environments

The increasing role and importance of ubiquitous computing and mobile environments in our daily lives implies the need for new solutions. The characteristics of agents and multi-agent systems make them very appropriate for constructing ubiquitous and mobile systems. This chapter presents some of the advances in practical and theoretical applications of multi-agent systems in the fields of ubiquitous computing and mobile environments carried out by several AgentCities.ES research groups

C-Arc: A Novel Architecture for Next Generation Context- Aware Systems

Computing is becoming increasingly mobile and ubiquitous. This implies that applications and services must be aware and adapt to highly dynamic environments. However, building contextaware mobile services is currently a complex and time consuming task. The emergence of truly ubiquitous computing, enabled by the availability of mobile and heterogeneous devices and an increasing number of commercial off-the-shelf sensing technologies, is hampered by the lack of standard architectural support for the development of context-aware systems. In this paper, the common architecture principles of context-aware systems are presented and the crucial contextaware architecture issues to support the next generation context-aware systems which will enable seamless service provisioning in heterogeneous, dynamically varying computing and communication environments are identified and discussed. Furthermore, a novel architecture, CArc,is proposed to aid in the development of the next generation context-aware systems. A prototype implemented of C-Arc is also presented to demonstrate the architecture. C-Arc provides support for most of the tasks involved in dealing with context, namely acquiring context from various sources, interpreting context and disseminating context.Keywords: Context-aware architecture, context-aware systems, context-aware mobile services,mobile and ubiquitous computing

Efficient Discovery Protocol for Ubiquitous Communication in Wireless Environment

Nowadays, according to the advances of the wireless network technologies and also mobile computing devices the concept of ubiquitous computing environments has become a considerable research area. Ubiquitous computing environment means an environment which is saturated by elements or devices with capacities of computing and communication. So, there are a lot of ways to develop and employ applications in such environment as infrastructure, but the most effective and general one is using service advertisements, service discovery and service remote invocation. In an Ad-hoc network which its devices make an ubiquitous computing environment, every device as a server node can announce various applications as services in the environment and at the same time every device is able to listen to the network interface and be aware of surrounding services and invoke the remote services.A mechanism which is needed to recognize surrounding services is called service discovery, this mechanism also clears how to advertise services, and invoke them. Type and method of discovery procedures play the critical role in quality and efficiency of services in ubiquitous environments. Because of these properties (small and mobile) there is a serious limitation for the resources of devices specially power resource. The problem is that the most of service discovery protocols are not effective for wireless Ad- Hoc networks and ubiquities environments, efficiency in case of service quality and power consumption. In this research a new mechanism and algorithm is designed to improve current wireless service discovery protocols. Analysis of the results has shown that the designed mechanism in most of the comparative parameters such as speed of service delivery, power consumption, and coverage of the services will act much better than the current discovery protocols. The proposed solution is compared with (directory based and directory-less based) of discovery protocols in ubiquitous environment in three states: mobile nodes, mobile and static nodes, and static nodes. It can be derived that the proposed model obtains fewer messages around 52% while maintain the same rate of service discovery and false rate of service discovery. The reduction of the number of posts per request coupled with the fact that devices with greater time availability transmit more responses in the proposed model, it can be concluded that energy consumption in devices with more restrictions will be decreased

Context-sensitive authorization for asynchronous communications

Main requirement of recent computing environments, like mobile and then ubiquitous computing, is to adapt applications to context. On the other hand, access control generally trust users once they have authenticated, despite the fact that they may reach unauthorized situations. We analyse how dynamic information can be used to improve security in the authorization process, especially in the case of asynchronous communications, like messaging or eventing. We experiment and validate our approach using context as an authorization factor for eventing in Web service for device (like UPnP or DPWS)

Integrating local services and applications into external user home environments

Users moving between different ubiquitous computing environments should be able to take a full profit of the resources existent there, if their home environment (e.g. a mobile portal) could seamlessly integrate with local infrastructure. Pursuing such goal, this paper focuses on the aspects of integrating local applications and services into an external user home environment, with particular emphasis on the interoperability and performance issues. Based on the concept of Value ADded Environment (VADE), as an administrative and physical domain, where the locally available facilities can be combined with external user home environments, the paper presents a middleware solution supporting the integration of local services and applications available in VADE environments into an external portal

Context-Sensitive Authorization in Interaction Patterns

Main requirement of recent computing environments, like mobile and then ubiquitous computing, is to adapt applications to context. On the other hand, access control generally trust users once they have authenticated, despite the fact that they may reach unauthorized situations. We analyse how dynamic information can be used to improve security in the authorization process, and what are the implications when applied to interaction patterns. We experiment and validate our approach using context as an authorization factor for eventing in Web service for device (like UPnP or DPWS)

The far side of mobile application integrated development environments

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Smart phones are, nowadays, a necessity for the vast majority of individuals around the globe. In addition to the ubiquitous computing paradigm supported by such devices, there are numerous software applications that utilize the high computational capabilities that they offer. This type of software is a vital part of what is known as e-Commerce, with a variety of business models proposed and implemented. Lately, a new era of free-ware mobile application has arisen with paid features and promoted content in them. Piracy is not only the weakest point of software’s financial ecosystem for conventional computing systems but also for smartphones. Actions like replication, redistribution and licensing violations can cause financial losses of colossal extent to their creators. Mobile applications also introduce the following peculiarity: They are distributed through predefined channels (Application Stores) owned by mobile operating system vendors such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. In this research we present several scenarios where cracked and modified applications can be freely used into every non jailbroken iOS device. Moreover it is demonstrated that not even in strict mobile environments, such as Apple’s, end-users should be considered as trusted entities from application developers by default