Use of context-awareness in mobile peer-to-peer networks

Mobile ad-hoc network are an emerging research field due to the potential range of applications that they support and for the problems they present due to their dynamic nature. Peer-to-peer is an example of a class of applications that have recently been deployed on top of ad-hoc networks. In this paper we propose an approach based on context-awareness to allow peer-to-peer applications to exploit information on the underlying network context to achieve better performance and better group organization. Information such as availability of resources, battery power, services in reach and relative distances can be used to improve the routing structures of the peer-to-peer network, thus reducing the routing overhead

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities

Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content

Longitude : a privacy-preserving location sharing protocol for mobile applications

Location sharing services are becoming increasingly popular. Although many location sharing services allow users to set up privacy policies to control who can access their location, the use made by service providers remains a source of concern. Ideally, location sharing providers and middleware should not be able to access users’ location data without their consent. In this paper, we propose a new location sharing protocol called Longitude that eases privacy concerns by making it possible to share a user’s location data blindly and allowing the user to control who can access her location, when and to what degree of precision. The underlying cryptographic algorithms are designed for GPS-enabled mobile phones. We describe and evaluate our implementation for the Nexus One Android mobile phone

A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms

We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet. To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users, among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players, rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem, and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis, we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges and solution