Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

Million of wireless device users are ever on the move, becoming more dependent on their PDAs, smart phones, and other handheld devices. With the advancement of pervasive computing, new and unique capabilities are available to aid mobile societies. The wireless nature of these devices has fostered a new era of mobility. Thousands of pervasive devices are able to arbitrarily join and leave a network, creating a nomadic environment known as a pervasive ad hoc network. However, mobile devices have vulnerabilities, and some are proving to be challenging. Security in pervasive computing is the most critical challenge. Security is needed to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control, to name a few. Security for mobile devices, though still in its infancy, has drawn the attention of various researchers. As pervasive devices become incorporated in our day-to-day lives, security will increasingly becoming a common concern for all users - - though for most it will be an afterthought, like many other computing functions. The usability and expansion of pervasive computing applications depends greatly on the security and reliability provided by the applications. At this critical juncture, security research is growing. This paper examines the recent trends and forward thinking investigation in several fields of security, along with a brief history of previous accomplishments in the corresponding areas. Some open issues have been discussed for further investigation

Wi-Fi fingerprinting based on collaborative confidence level training

Wi-Fi fingerprinting has been a popular indoor positioning technique with the advantage that infrastructures are readily available in most urban areas. However wireless signals are prone to fluctuation and noise, introducing errors in the final positioning result. This paper proposes a new fingerprint training method where a number of users train collaboratively and a confidence factor is generated for each fingerprint. Fingerprinting is carried out where potential fingerprints are extracted based on the confidence factor. Positioning accuracy improves by 40% when the new fingerprinting method is implemented and maximum error is reduced by 35%

Pervasive and mobile computing

The Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (PMC) is a professional, peer-reviewed journal that publishes high-quality scientific articles (both theory and practice) covering all aspects of pervasive computing and communications

Extending BPEL for Interoperable Pervasive Computing

The widespread deployment of mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones has created a vast computation and communication platform for pervasive computing applications. However, these devices feature an array of incompatible hardware and software architectures, discouraging ad-hoc interactions among devices. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) allows users in wired computing settings to model applications of significant complexity, leveraging Web standards to guarantee interoperability. However, BPEL\u27s inflexible communication model effectively prohibits its deployment on the kinds of dynamic wireless networks used by most pervasive computing devices. This paper presents extensions to BPEL that address these restrictions, transforming BPEL into a versatile platform for interoperable pervasive computing applications. We discuss our implementation of these extensions in Sliver, a lightweight BPEL execution engine that we have developed for mobile devices. We also evaluate a pervasive computing application prototype implemented in BPEL, running on Sliver

An empirical study of power consumption of Web-based communications in mobile phones

Currently, mobile devices are the most popular pervasive computing device, and they are becoming the primer way for Web access. Energy is a critical resource in such pervasive computing devices, being network communication one of the primary energy consuming operations in mobile apps. Indeed, web-based communication is the most used, but also energy demanding. So, mobile web developers should be aware of how much energy consumes the different web-based communication alternatives. The goal of this paper is to measure and compare the energy consumption of three asynchronous Web-based methods in mobile devices. Our experiments consider three different Web applications models that allow a web server to push data to a browser: Polling, Long Polling and WebSockets. The obtained results are analyzed to get more accurate understanding of the impact in energy consumption of a mobile browser for each of these three methods. The utility of these experiments is to show developers what are the factors that influence the energy consumption when different web-based asynchronous communication is used. With this information mobile web developers could reduce the power consumption of web applications on mobile devices, by selecting the most appropriate method for asynchronous server communication.MUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

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

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

6th international workshop on pervasive eye tracking and mobile eye-based interaction

Previous work on eye tracking and eye-based human-computer interfaces mainly concentrated on making use of the eyes in traditional desktop settings. With the recent growth of interest in wearable computers, such as smartwatches, smart eyewears and low-cost mobile eye trackers, eye-based interaction techniques for mobile computing are becoming increasingly important. PETMEI 2016 focuses on the pervasive eye tracking paradigm as a trailblazer for mobile eye-based interaction to take eye tracking out into the wild, to mobile and pervasive settings. We want to stimulate and explore the creativity of these communities with respect to the implications, key research challenges, and new applications for pervasive eye tracking in ubiquitous computing. The long-term goal is to create a strong interdisciplinary research community linking these fields together and to establish the workshop as the premier forum for research on pervasive eye tracking