Social pervasive systems: the harmonization between social networking and pervasive systems

The recent advancement in mobile device sensor technology, coupled with the wealth of structured accessible data of social networks, form a very data-wealthy ecosystem. Such an ecosystem is rich in bi-directional context that can flow between the mobile and social worlds enabling the creation of an elitist breed of pervasive services and applications. We label the breed resulting from the merger as Social Pervasive Systems (SPS)

Evaluating energy consumption on low-end smartphones

The relationship between battery consumption in smartphones and the usage statistics of a phone is direct. Modern smartphones, even low-end, are equipped with multiple wireless technologies, e.g. GSM, 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth. Each of these technologies has a different energy consumption profile. A wireless mesh project in the Mankosi community in rural South Africa is about to introduce low-end smartphones onto the network. The mesh network is powered with solar-charged batteries because the community at present does not have electricity. Local residents also use these batteries to recharge cell phones at a nominal cost. Introduction of smartphones will increase the recharge frequency as phone usage will increase; thus draining a phone battery more quickly, as well as escalate recharge costs. Thus, the smartphones must be chosen and used effectively in order for batteries to last longer. Related work identifies WiFi wireless technology as the most battery efficient way of transfer when compared to GSM, 3G and Bluetooth. This research proposes experiments to further investigate energy efficiency of WiFi in low-end smartphones that we intend to use for local and breakout voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calls and data services, on a rural wireless mesh network

Smartphone malware based on synchronisation vulnerabilities

Smartphones are mobile phones that offer processing power and features like personal computers (PC) with the aim of improving user productivity as they allow users to access and manipulate data over networks and Internet, through various mobile applications. However, with such anywhere and anytime functionality, new security threats and risks of sensitive and personal data are envisaged to evolve. With the emergence of open mobile platforms that enable mobile users to install applications on their own, it opens up new avenues for propagating malware among various mobile users very quickly. In particular, they become crossover targets of PC malware through the synchronization function between smartphones and computers. Literature lacks detailed analysis of smartphones malware and synchronization vulnerabilities. This paper addresses these gaps in literature, by first identifying the similarities and differences between smartphone malware and PC malware, and then by investigating how hackers exploit synchronization vulnerabilities to launch their attacks

Inferring Person-to-person Proximity Using WiFi Signals

Today's societies are enveloped in an ever-growing telecommunication infrastructure. This infrastructure offers important opportunities for sensing and recording a multitude of human behaviors. Human mobility patterns are a prominent example of such a behavior which has been studied based on cell phone towers, Bluetooth beacons, and WiFi networks as proxies for location. However, while mobility is an important aspect of human behavior, understanding complex social systems requires studying not only the movement of individuals, but also their interactions. Sensing social interactions on a large scale is a technical challenge and many commonly used approaches---including RFID badges or Bluetooth scanning---offer only limited scalability. Here we show that it is possible, in a scalable and robust way, to accurately infer person-to-person physical proximity from the lists of WiFi access points measured by smartphones carried by the two individuals. Based on a longitudinal dataset of approximately 800 participants with ground-truth interactions collected over a year, we show that our model performs better than the current state-of-the-art. Our results demonstrate the value of WiFi signals in social sensing as well as potential threats to privacy that they imply

PIPeR: Impact of power-awareness on social-based opportunistic advertising

Interest and social-awareness can be valuable determinants in decisions related to content delivery in mobile environments. Under certain conditions, we can deliver content with less cost and better delivery ratios, while only involving users that are interested in the type of content being delivered. However, the depletion of valuable power resources poses a deterrent to node participation in such interest-aware forwarding systems. No significant research contribution has been identified to collectively maximize the benefits of social, interest, and power awareness. In this work, we propose a new algorithm called PIPeR which integrates power awareness with an interest and socially aware forwarding algorithm called IPeR. Through simulations, we present and evaluate four modes of PIPeR. The results show that PIPeR is more fair and preserves at least 22% of the power IPeR consumes with less delay, while relying significantly on interested forwarders and with comparable cost to maintain similar delivery ratios

Paradigm-Shifting Players for IoT: Smart-Watches for Intensive Care Monitoring

Wearable devices, e.g. smart-watches, are gaining popularity in many fields and in wellness monitoring too. In this paper we propose an IoT application to alert the medical doctor assigned to a critical unit by using a smart-watch. The wearable device improves the efficacy of monitoring patients at risk in hospital units allowing the medical doctor to access information at any time and from any place. A network was built to wirelessly connect bio-sensing platforms, which measure metabolites concentration in patients’ fluids (e.g. blood), with a dedicated application running on the smart-watch. In case of anomalous measured values, incoming alert notifications are received to ask urgent medical intervention. The main advantage of this new approach is that the doctors, or in general the caregivers, can freely move in the hospital other structures and perform other tasks meanwhile simultaneously and constantly monitoring all the patients thanks to the technology on their wrist

Distance-based Cluster Head Election for Mobile Sensing

Energy-efficient, fair, stochastic leader-selection algorithms are designed for mobile sensing scenarios which adapt the sensing strategy depending on the mobile sensing topology. Methods for electing a cluster head are crucially important when optimizing the trade-off between the number of peer-to- peer interactions between mobiles and client-server interactions with a cloud-hosted application server. The battery-life of mobile devices is a crucial constraint facing application developers who are looking to use the convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing to perform environmental sensing. We exploit the mobile network topology, specifically the location of mobiles with respect to the gateway device, to stochastically elect a cluster head so that (1) different energy saving policies can be implemented and (2) battery lifetime is increased given an energy efficiency policy, in a fair way. We demonstrate that the battery usage can be made more fair by reducing the difference in battery life-time of mobiles by up to 66%

SAROS: A social-aware opportunistic forwarding simulator

Many applications are being developed to leverage the popularity of mobile opportunistic networks. However, building adaptive testbeds can be costly and challenging. This challenge motivates the need for effective opportunistic network simulators to provide a variety of opportunistic environment setups, and evaluate proposed applications and protocols with a comprehensive set of metrics. This paper presents SAROS, a simulator of opportunistic networking environments with a variety of interest distributions, power consumption distributions, imported real traces, and social network integration. The simulator provides a wide variety of evaluation metrics that are not offered by comparable simulators. Finally, SAROS also implements several opportunistic forwarding algorithms ranging from social-oblivious algorithms to interest and power-aware social-based algorithms

Modern human machine interface in industrial wireless networks

This paper presents several existing experimental setups on latest industrial systems and provide comparison of advantages and disadvantages of different HMI implementation. It proposes a simple and low cost HMI system for automation by using remote software application. The method does not required specific software package from vendors, hence provide a low cost and easily available solutions for control. We have examined their switching on various wireless technologies including Bluetooth, Infrared, Wi-Fi and Cellular Mobile Systems. The presented HMI provide effective and inexpensive control of automation systems by using remote software packages on the mobile phone, tablet and laptop. This paper presents several experiments on HMIs. The first set of experiments are related existing HMI systems on latest Siemens TIA Portal software and hardware. The second set of experiments presents the developed method of HMI switching and control by using remote communication software; Vectir and Teamviewer over different industrial wireless technologies