Envisioning the Next Generation Cellular Client

The cellular revolution has been accompanied by a gradual evolution in functionality. The Motorola handie-talkie introduced in the early 1940‟s was a five pound behemoth that barely worked. Contemporary phones have become ubiquitous devices that are outfitted with camera, video, GPS, internet and e-mail. Fourth generation phones are expected to provide high speed internet access for data as well as multi-media through protocols that subsume existing standards. Beyond this, the capabilities of 4G phones have not been spelled out in detail. In this paper we outline our vision of a feature rich next generation phone that is backed up by an infrastructure of service offerings

A Methodology for Engineering Collaborative and ad-hoc Mobile Applications using SyD Middleware

Today’s web applications are more collaborative and utilize standard and ubiquitous Internet protocols. We have earlier developed System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware to rapidly develop and deploy collaborative applications over heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices hosting web objects. In this paper, we present the software engineering methodology for developing SyD-enabled web applications and illustrate it through a case study on two representative applications: (i) a calendar of meeting application, which is a collaborative application and (ii) a travel application which is an ad-hoc collaborative application. SyD-enabled web objects allow us to create a collaborative application rapidly with limited coding effort. In this case study, the modular software architecture allowed us to hide the inherent heterogeneity among devices, data stores, and networks by presenting a uniform and persistent object view of mobile objects interacting through XML/SOAP requests and responses. The performance results we obtained show that the application scales well as we increase the group size and adapts well within the constraints of mobile devices

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

Designing for frustration and disputes in the family car

This article appears with the express permission of the publisher, IGI Global.Families spend an increasing amount of time in the car carrying out a number of activities including driving to work, caring for children and co-ordinating drop-offs and pickups. While families travelling in cars may face stress from difficult road conditions, they are also likely to be frustrated by coordinating a number of activities and resolving disputes within the confined space of car. A rising number of in-car infotainment and driver-assistance systems aim to help reduce the stress from outside the vehicle and improve the experience of driving but may fail to address sources of stress from within the car. From ethnographic studies of family car journeys, we examine the work of parents in managing multiple stresses while driving, along with the challenges of distractions from media use in the car. Keeping these family extracts as a focus for analysis, we draw out some design considerations that help build on the observations from our empirical work.Microsoft Research and the Dorothy Hodgkin Awar

Towards social paradigms for mobile context-aware computing in smart cities

Ponència presentada a la 11ª Conferencia Ibérica de Sistemas y Tecnologías de Información (CISTI 2016) celebrada a Gran Canaria els dies 15-18 de juny de 2016Mobile context-aware computing is an essential component of the smart cities infrastructure. Attempts were made to develop a model that can effectively represent a system in device to support context-aware behavior. The purpose of this paper is to identify deficiencies of the previously developed model and propose solutions to improve it.The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Commission through the GEO-C project (H2020- MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant Agreement Number 642332, http://www.geo-c.eu/). Carlos Granell has been partly funded by the Ramón y Cajal Programme (grant numbers RYC-2014- 16913

Integration of heterogeneous devices and communication models via the cloud in the constrained internet of things

As the Internet of Things continues to expand in the coming years, the need for services that span multiple IoT application domains will continue to increase in order to realize the efficiency gains promised by the IoT. Today, however, service developers looking to add value on top of existing IoT systems are faced with very heterogeneous devices and systems. These systems implement a wide variety of network connectivity options, protocols (proprietary or standards-based), and communication methods all of which are unknown to a service developer that is new to the IoT. Even within one IoT standard, a device typically has multiple options for communicating with others. In order to alleviate service developers from these concerns, this paper presents a cloud-based platform for integrating heterogeneous constrained IoT devices and communication models into services. Our evaluation shows that the impact of our approach on the operation of constrained devices is minimal while providing a tangible benefit in service integration of low-resource IoT devices. A proof of concept demonstrates the latter by means of a control and management dashboard for constrained devices that was implemented on top of the presented platform. The results of our work enable service developers to more easily implement and deploy services that span a wide variety of IoT application domains

Sociology Paradigms for Dynamic Integration of Devices into a Context-Aware System

Ubiquitous and m obile context - aware computing is an essential component of the smart cities infrastructure. Widely available wireless networks, the maturity level of distributed computing and the increasing number of mobile devices have significantly influenced the human experience with computing. In the present paper, we discuss the need for a model that will be able to represent a formal structure of a context - aware system in a device . The core functionality of the model is expected to expose context - aware behaviour and support dynamic integration of mobile devices and context - aware behaviour. The major contribution of this work is to identify deficiencies of the existing model which is using the notions from sociology such as Role, Ownership and Responsibility.The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Commission through the GEO-C project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant Agreement Number 642332, http://www.geo-c.eu/)