Mobile application development exploiting science gateway technologies

Nowadays, collaborative applications are valuable tools for scientists to share their studies and experiences, for example, by interacting simultaneously with their data and outcomes giving feedback to other colleagues on how the data are processed. This paper presents a mobile application connected to a workflow-enabled framework to perform visualization and data analysis of large-scale, multi-dimensional datasets on distributed computing infrastructures. In particular, the usage of workflow-driven applications, through science gateway technologies, allows the scientist to share heavy data exploration tasks as workflows and the relative results in a transparent and user-friendly way

Realising context-sensitive mobile messaging

Mobile technologies aim to assist people as they move from place to place going about their daily work and social routines. Established and very popular mobile technologies include short-text messages and multimedia messages with newer growing technologies including Bluetooth mobile data transfer protocols and mobile web access.Here we present new work which combines all of the above technologies to fulfil some of the predictions for future context aware messaging. We present a context sensitive mobile messaging system which derives context in the form of physical locations through location sensing and the co-location of people through Bluetooth familiarity

A BLE-based multi-gateway network infrastructure with handover support for mobile BLE peripherals

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a popular technology within the Internet of Things. It allows low-power, star networks to be set up between a BLE gateway and multiple, power-constrained BLE devices. However, these networks tend to be static, not supporting BLE devices that can freely move around in an environment of multiple interconnected BLE gateways and perform handovers whenever necessary. This work proposes two alternative network architectures for mobile BLE peripherals. One leverages on IPv6 over BLE, whereas the other combines default BLE mechanisms with an additional custom controller. On top, we study in detail the handover mechanism that must be present in both architectures and compare the performance of both a passive and active handover approach. The passive handover approach can be set up without any extra implementation, but an active handover approach offers more proactive handover decisions and can provide a much lower handover latency. All proposed solutions have been implemented and validated on real hardware, showing the feasibility of having future infrastructures with support for mobile BLE devices

Will SDN be part of 5G?

For many, this is no longer a valid question and the case is considered settled with SDN/NFV (Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization) providing the inevitable innovation enablers solving many outstanding management issues regarding 5G. However, given the monumental task of softwarization of radio access network (RAN) while 5G is just around the corner and some companies have started unveiling their 5G equipment already, the concern is very realistic that we may only see some point solutions involving SDN technology instead of a fully SDN-enabled RAN. This survey paper identifies all important obstacles in the way and looks at the state of the art of the relevant solutions. This survey is different from the previous surveys on SDN-based RAN as it focuses on the salient problems and discusses solutions proposed within and outside SDN literature. Our main focus is on fronthaul, backward compatibility, supposedly disruptive nature of SDN deployment, business cases and monetization of SDN related upgrades, latency of general purpose processors (GPP), and additional security vulnerabilities, softwarization brings along to the RAN. We have also provided a summary of the architectural developments in SDN-based RAN landscape as not all work can be covered under the focused issues. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of SDN-based RAN and clearly points out the gaps in the technology.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figure