Pervasive Games in a Mote-Enabled Virtual World Using Tuple Space Middleware

Pervasive games are a new and exciting field where the user experience benefits from the blending of real and virtual elements. Players are no longer confined to computer screens. Rather, interactions with devices embedded within the real world and physical movements become an integral part of the gaming experience. Several prototypes of pervasive games have been proposed by both industry and academia. However, in such games the issues arising from the integration of players and real world, the management of the context surrounding the players, and the need for communication and distributed coordination are often addressed in an ad-hoc fashion. Therefore, the underlying software fabric is often not reusable, ultimately slowing down the diffusion of pervasive games. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a pervasive game on top of TinyLIME, a middleware system supporting data sharing among mobile and embedded devices. By illustrating the design of a pervasive game we developed, we argue concretely that the programming abstractions supported by TinyLIME greatly simplify the data and context management characteristics of pervasive games, and provide an effective and reusable building block for their development. TinyLIME was originally designed to support applications where mobile users collect data from sensors scattered in the physical environment. We build upon this capability to put forth a second contribution, namely, the use of wireless sensor devices (or motes) as a computing platform for pervasive games. Besides reporting physical data for the sake of the game, we use motes to store information relevant to the game plot, e.g., virtual objects. Motes are typically very small in size, and therefore can be hidden in the environment, enhancing the sense of immersion in a virtual world. To the best of our knowledge, this original use of wireless sensor devices is novel in the scientific and gaming literature. Furthermore, it is naturally supported by TinyLIME, yielding a unified programming abstraction that spans the heterogeneous gaming platform we propose

uOS : A resource rerouting middleware for ubiquitous games

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) relies on the computation distributed over the environment to simplify the tasks performed by its users. A smart space is an instance of a ubiquitous environment, composed of a dynamic and heterogeneous set of devices that interact to support the execution of distributed smart applications. In this context, mobile devices provide new resources when they join the environment, which disappear when they leave it. This introduces the challenge of self-adaptation, in which smart applications may either include new resources as they become available or replace them when they become unavailable. Ubiquitous games combine ubicomp and computer game technologies to enrich user’s experience and fun. Such games may benefit from different input and output resources offered by mobile devices. To support the development and deployment of ubiquitous games, this work presents the uOS middleware. Using a DSOA (Device Service Oriented Architecture) based architecture and lightweight service discovery protocols, uOS ensures compatibility among resources, providing resource rerouting between heterogeneous and limited software and hardware platforms. The uMoleHunt game is presented to illustrate the practical application of uOS

The SATIN component system - a metamodel for engineering adaptable mobile systems

Mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants and mobile phones, are becoming increasingly popular, smaller, and more capable. We argue that mobile systems should be able to adapt to changing requirements and execution environments. Adaptation requires the ability-to reconfigure the deployed code base on a mobile device. Such reconfiguration is considerably simplified if mobile applications are component-oriented rather than monolithic blocks of code. We present the SATIN (system adaptation targeting integrated networks) component metamodel, a lightweight local component metamodel that offers the flexible use of logical mobility primitives to reconfigure the software system by dynamically transferring code. The metamodel is implemented in the SATIN middleware system, a component-based mobile computing middleware that uses the mobility primitives defined in the metamodel to reconfigure both itself and applications that it hosts. We demonstrate the suitability of SATIN in terms of lightweightedness, flexibility, and reusability for the creation of adaptable mobile systems by using it to implement, port, and evaluate a number of existing and new applications, including an active network platform developed for satellite communication at the European space agency. These applications exhibit different aspects of adaptation and demonstrate the flexibility of the approach and the advantages gaine

Adapting mobile systems using logical mobility primitives

Mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants and mobile phones, are becoming increasingly popular, smaller, more capable and even fashionable personal items. Combined with the recent advent of wireless networking techniques, users are equipped with mobile devices of significant computational abilities, which are able to wirelessly access information by dynamically connecting to many different networks. Despite the ubiquity of mobile devices, mobile systems are built using monolithic architectures, use a small set of predefined interaction paradigms and do not exploit or adapt to the dynamicity of their local or remote context. Applications deployed on mobile devices face considerable challenges posed by their changing surroundings. One of the main peculiarities of mobile devices is heterogeneity, which may occur in software, hardware and network protocols. Mobile systems may carry a large number of different applications, use different operating systems and middleware and, often, have more than one network interface. A further challenge is their considerable variation in the computational resources available, such as battery power, CPU speed, network bandwidth and volatile and persistent memory. Moreover, mobile computing systems are highly dynamic systems, in terms of their surroundings, implying that the requirements for applications deployed on a mobile device are a moving target. Changes in the requirements (such as integration with a new service) may require changes to the application. Consequently, these changes may mean that the application behaviour needs to adapt. This thesis argues that the potential of the ubiquity of mobile devices cannot be realised using static and monolithic architectures, as mobile systems need to be able to adapt to accommodate changes to their environment. It investigates the use of three technologies to offer adaptation to mobile devices: Logical mobility techniques, component systems and middleware technologies. More specifically, this thesis presents the SATIN (System Adaptation Targeting Integrated Networks) component metamodel, a lightweight local component metamodel that offers the flexible use of logical mobility primitives. The metamodel is instantiated to build the SATIN middleware system, a component-based mobile computing middleware that uses the mobility primitives exported by the metamodel to reconfigure itself and applications running on top of it. The suitability of SATIN for the creation of adaptable mobile systems is demonstrated, by using it to implement and evaluate a number of applications showing different aspects of adaptation. Moreover, existing projects are reengineered to run as SATIN components, showing the flexibility of the approach and the advantages gained over the originals

Adaptive Middleware for Resource-Constrained Mobile Ad Hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks: MANETs) and wireless sensor networks: WSNs) are two recently-developed technologies that uniquely function without fixed infrastructure support, and sense at scales, resolutions, and durations previously not possible. While both offer great potential in many applications, developing software for these types of networks is extremely difficult, preventing their wide-spread use. Three primary challenges are: 1) the high level of dynamics within the network in terms of changing wireless links and node hardware configurations,: 2) the wide variety of hardware present in these networks, and: 3) the extremely limited computational and energy resources available. Until now, the burden of handling these issues was put on the software application developer. This dissertation presents three novel programming models and middleware systems that address these challenges: Limone, Agilla, and Servilla. Limone reliably handles high levels of dynamics within MANETs. It does this through lightweight coordination primitives that make minimal assumptions about network connectivity. Agilla enables self-adaptive WSN applications via the integration of mobile agent and tuple space programming models, which is critical given the continuously changing network. It is the first system to successfully demonstrate the feasibility of using mobile agents and tuple spaces within WSNs. Servilla addresses the challenges that arise from WSN hardware heterogeneity using principles of Service-Oriented Computing: SOC). It is the first system to successfully implement the entire SOC model within WSNs and uniquely tailors it to the WSN domain by making it energy-aware and adaptive. The efficacies of the above three systems are demonstrated through implementation, micro-benchmarks, and the evaluation of several real-world applications including Universal Remote, Fire Detection and Tracking, Structural Health Monitoring, and Medical Patient Monitoring

Presence-based integration of wireless sensor network and IP multimedia subsystem : architecture implementation and case studies

Services are the main driving forces of the Telecommunication industry. In old days the traditional networks e.g. PSTN and mobile cellular networks provide basic services to customers such as voice call, SMS. Unlike mobile cellular networks, Internet provides wide variety of services that allow users to communicate in different ways for example E-mail, WWW, VoIP, and Instant Messaging. To benefit from these Internet (IP) based services and to support new value-added services in mobile cellular networks, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is defined. It aims at convergence of Internet and the cellular world. IMS introduced an architectural framework envisioned by telecom experts for providing wide variety of multimedia services for example Presence, Context-based applications, Conferencing, Video-on-Demand, Instant Messaging to name just a few. The main ingredients of these services are data which can be either provided by users or derived from external sources (other networks). In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks have emerged as networks of tiny devices, sensor nodes. WSNs are characteristically different from existing networks. In general, a WSN is a data oriented network in which sensors sense physical environment and produce data to deliver it to interested applications. These applications are usually external to WSN and reside in an external network (e.g. IMS). The applications or services use this physical data to deliver enhanced services such as context-based services to mobile users. The challenge is to integrate WSN with IMS so that the WSN data can be accessible to IMS services or applications. This thesis exploits a presence-based approach for the integration of WSN and IMS network. A standard interface for data exchange between WSN and IMS has been devised in the Telecommunication Service Engineering group. The data exchange between WSN and IMS services/applications is realized as a publish-subscribe mechanism. In publish-subscribe mechanism the applications subscribe to WSN services (data) and get notified when sensors report any data while the WSN is acting as publisher to publish sensor data to IMS. The presence-based WSN -- IMS architecture provides an abstraction to services and applications for accessing variety of sensed data from different WSNs. The presence based WSN-IMS architecture realizes two main architectural entities, the integrated WSN-IMS gateway and an IMS extended presence server. These two architectural entities play a key role in interworking of WSN and IMS network. The overall architecture has been implemented and tested with prototype applications as well as a performance evaluation has been done to see the efficiency and applicability of the integrated architectur

Object Technology for Ambient Intelligence : Workshop Reader for OT4Aml at ECOOP 2007

This reader comprises the submissions to the third workshop on object-technology for Ambient Intelligence and Pervasive Computing held at ECOOP 2007