Reliability of Mobile Agents for Reliable Service Discovery Protocol in MANET

Recently mobile agents are used to discover services in mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) where agents travel through the network, collecting and sometimes spreading the dynamically changing service information. But it is important to investigate how reliable the agents are for this application as the dependability issues(reliability and availability) of MANET are highly affected by its dynamic nature.The complexity of underlying MANET makes it hard to obtain the route reliability of the mobile agent systems (MAS); instead we estimate it using Monte Carlo simulation. Thus an algorithm for estimating the task route reliability of MAS (deployed for discovering services) is proposed, that takes into account the effect of node mobility in MANET. That mobility pattern of the nodes affects the MAS performance is also shown by considering different mobility models. Multipath propagation effect of radio signal is considered to decide link existence. Transient link errors are also considered. Finally we propose a metric to calculate the reliability of service discovery protocol and see how MAS performance affects the protocol reliability. The experimental results show the robustness of the proposed algorithm. Here the optimum value of network bandwidth (needed to support the agents) is calculated for our application. However the reliability of MAS is highly dependent on link failure probability

Container network functions: bringing NFV to the network edge

In order to cope with the increasing network utilization driven by new mobile clients, and to satisfy demand for new network services and performance guarantees, telecommunication service providers are exploiting virtualization over their network by implementing network services in virtual machines, decoupled from legacy hardware accelerated appliances. This effort, known as NFV, reduces OPEX and provides new business opportunities. At the same time, next generation mobile, enterprise, and IoT networks are introducing the concept of computing capabilities being pushed at the network edge, in close proximity of the users. However, the heavy footprint of today's NFV platforms prevents them from operating at the network edge. In this article, we identify the opportunities of virtualization at the network edge and present Glasgow Network Functions (GNF), a container-based NFV platform that runs and orchestrates lightweight container VNFs, saving core network utilization and providing lower latency. Finally, we demonstrate three useful examples of the platform: IoT DDoS remediation, on-demand troubleshooting for telco networks, and supporting roaming of network functions

Chatbots for learning: A review of educational chatbots for the Facebook Messenger

With the exponential growth in the mobile device market over the last decade, chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular option to interact with users, and their popularity and adoption are rapidly spreading. These mobile devices change the way we communicate and allow ever-present learning in various environments. This study examined educational chatbots for Facebook Messenger to support learning. The independent web directory was screened to assess chatbots for this study resulting in the identification of 89 unique chatbots. Each chatbot was classified by language, subject matter and developer's platform. Finally, we evaluated 47 educational chatbots using the Facebook Messenger platform based on the analytic hierarchy process against the quality attributes of teaching, humanity, affect, and accessibility. We found that educational chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform vary from the basic level of sending personalized messages to recommending learning content. Results show that chatbots which are part of the instant messaging application are still in its early stages to become artificial intelligence teaching assistants. The findings provide tips for teachers to integrate chatbots into classroom practice and advice what types of chatbots they can try out.Web of Science151art. no. 10386

AmbieSense: a system and reference architecture for personalised and context-sensitive information services for mobile users

The purpose of AmbieSense is to provide personalised, context-sensitive information to the mobile user. It is about augmenting digital information to physical objects, rooms, and areas. The aim is to provide relevant information to the right user and situation. Digital content is distributed from the surroundings and onto your mobile phone. An ambient information environment is provided by a combination of context tag technology, a software platform to manage and deliver the information, and personal computing devices to which the information is served. This paper describes how the AmbieSense reference architecture has been defined and used in order to deliver information to the mobile citizen at the right time, place and situation. Information is provided via specialist content providers. The application area addresses the information needs of travellers and tourists

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

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Investigation into Mobile Learning Framework in Cloud Computing Platform

Abstract—Cloud computing infrastructure is increasingly used for distributed applications. Mobile learning applications deployed in the cloud are a new research direction. The applications require specific development approaches for effective and reliable communication. This paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach for design and development of mobile applications in the cloud. The approach includes front service toolkit and backend service toolkit. The front service toolkit packages data and sends it to a backend deployed in a cloud computing platform. The backend service toolkit manages rules and workflow, and then transmits required results to the front service toolkit. To further show feasibility of the approach, the paper introduces a case study and shows its performance