Proximity-based systems: Incorporating mobility and scalability through proximity sensing

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis argues that the concept of spatial proximity offers a viable and practical option for the development of context-aware systems for highly mobile and dynamic environments. Such systems would overcome the shortcomings experienced by today’s location-based and infrastructure dependent systems whose ability to deliver context-awareness is prescribed by their infrastructure. The proposed architecture will also allow for scalable interaction as against the single level of interaction in existing systems which limits services to a particular sized area. The thesis examines the concept of spatial proximity and demonstrates how this concept can be exploited to take advantage of technological convergence to offer mobility and scalability to systems. It discusses the design of a proximity-based system that can deliver scalable context-aware services in highly mobile and dynamic environments. It explores the practical application of this novel design in a proximity-sensitive messaging application by creating a proof-of-concept prototype. The proof-of-concept prototype is used to evaluate the design as well as to elicit user views and expectations about a proximity-based approach. Together these provide a valuable insight into the applicability of the proximity-based approach for designing context-aware systems. The design and development work discussed in the thesis presents a Proximity-Sensitive System Architecture that can be adapted for a variety of proximity-sensitive services. This is illustrated by means of examples, including a variety of context-aware messaging applications. The thesis also raises issues for information delivery, resource sharing, and human-computer interaction. While the technological solution (proximity-based messaging) offered is only one among several that can be developed using this architecture, it offers the opportunity to stimulate ideas in the relatively new field of proximity and technological convergence research, and contributes to a better understanding of their potential role in offering context-aware services

Servicing Delay Sensitive Pervasive Communication Through Adaptable Width Channelization for Supporting Mobile Edge Computing

Over the last fifteen years, wireless local area networks (WLANs) have been populated by large variety of pervasive devices hosting heterogeneous applications. Pervasive Edge computing encouraged more distributed network applications for these devices, eliminating the round-trip to help in achieving zero latency dream. However, These applications require significantly variable data rates for effective functioning, especially in pervasive computing. The static bandwidth of frequency channelization in current WLANs strictly restricts the maximum achievable data rate by a network station. This static behavior spawns two major drawbacks: under-utilization of scarce spectrum resources and less support to delay sensitive applications such as voice and video.To this point, if the computing is moved to the edge of the network WLANs to reduce the frequency of communication, the pervasive devices can be provided with better services during the communication and networking. Thus, we aim to distribute spectrum resources among pervasive resources based upon delay sensitivity of applications while simultaneously maintaining the fair channel access semantics of medium access control (MAC) layer of WLANs. Henceforth, ultra-low latency, efficiency and reliability of spectrum resources can be assured. In this paper, two novel algorithms have been proposed for adaptive channelization to offer rational distribution of spectrum resources among pervasive Edge nodes based on their bandwidth requirement and assorted ambient conditions. The proposed algorithms have been implemented on a real test bed of commercially available universal software radio peripheral (USRP) devices. Thorough investigations have been carried out to enumerate the effect of dynamic bandwidth channelization on parameters such as medium utilization, achievable throughput, service delay, channel access fairness and bit error rates. The achieved empirical results demonstrate that we can optimally enhance the network-wide throughput by almost 30% using channels of adaptable bandwidths

Ubiquitous Computing for Remote Cardiac Patient Monitoring: A Survey

New wireless technologies, such as wireless LAN and sensor networks, for telecardiology purposes give new possibilities for monitoring vital parameters with wearable biomedical sensors, and give patients the freedom to be mobile and still be under continuous monitoring and thereby better quality of patient care. This paper will detail the architecture and quality-of-service (QoS) characteristics in integrated wireless telecardiology platforms. It will also discuss the current promising hardware/software platforms for wireless cardiac monitoring. The design methodology and challenges are provided for realistic implementation

Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

Application priority framework for fixed mobile converged communication networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The current prospects in wired and wireless access networks, it is becoming increasingly important to address potential convergence in order to offer integrated broadband services. These systems will need to offer higher data transmission capacities and long battery life, which is the catalyst for an everincreasing variety of air interface technologies targeting local area to wide area connectivity. Current integrated industrial networks do not offer application aware context delivery and enhanced services for optimised networks. Application aware services provide value-added functionality to business applications by capturing, integrating, and consolidating intelligence about users and their endpoint devices from various points in the network. This thesis mainly intends to resolve the issues related to ubiquitous application aware service, fair allocation of radio access, reduced energy consumption and improved capacity. A technique that measures and evaluates the data rate demand to reduce application response time and queuing delay for multi radio interfaces is proposed. The technique overcomes the challenges of network integration, requiring no user intervention, saving battery life and selecting the radio access connection for the application requested by the end user. This study is split in two parts. The first contribution identifies some constraints of the services towards the application layer in terms of e.g. data rate and signal strength. The objectives are achieved by application controlled handover (ACH) mechanism in order to maintain acceptable data rate for real-time application services. It also looks into the impact of the radio link on the application and identifies elements and parameters like wireless link quality and handover that will influence the application type. It also identifies some enhanced traditional mechanisms such as distance controlled multihop and mesh topology required in order to support energy efficient multimedia applications. The second contribution unfolds an intelligent application priority assignment mechanism (IAPAM) for medical applications using wireless sensor networks. IAPAM proposes and evaluates a technique based on prioritising multiple virtual queues for the critical nature of medical data to improve instant transmission. Various mobility patterns (directed, controlled and random waypoint) has been investigated and compared by simulating IAPAM enabled mobile BWSN. The following topics have been studied, modelled, simulated and discussed in this thesis: 1. Application Controlled Handover (ACH) for multi radios over fibre 2. Power Controlled Scheme for mesh multi radios over fibre using ACH 3. IAPAM for Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks (BWSN) and impact of mobility over IAPAM enabled BWSN. Extensive simulation studies are performed to analyze and to evaluate the proposed techniques. Simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in multi radios over fibre performance in terms of application response delay and power consumption by upto 75% and 15 % respectively, reduction in traffic loss by upto 53% and reduction in delay for real time application by more than 25% in some cases