A personal distributed environment for future mobile systems

A Personal Distributed Environment (PDE) embraces a user-centric view of communications that take place against a backdrop of multiple user devices, each with its distinct capabilities, in physically separate locations. This paper provides an overview of a Personal Distributed Environment and some of the research issues related to the implementation of the PDE concept that are being considered in the current Mobile VCE work programme

Securing the Home Energy Management Platform

Energy management in households gets increasingly more attention in the struggle to integrate more sustainable energy sources. Especially in the electrical system, smart grid systems are envisioned to be part in the efforts towards a better utilisation of the energy production and distribution infrastructure. The Home Energy Management System (HEMS) is a critical infrastructure component in this endeavour. Its main goal is to enable energy services utilising smart devices in the households based on the interest of the residential consumers and external actors. With the role of being both an essential link in the communication infrastructure for balancing the electrical grid and a surveillance unit in private homes, security and privacy become essential to address. In this chapter, we identify and address potential threats Home Energy Management Platform (HEMP) developers should consider in the progress of designing architecture, selecting hardware and building software. Our approach starts with a general view of the involved stakeholders and the HEMS. Given the system overview, a threat model is constructed from the HEMP developer\u27s point of view. Based on the threats that have been detected, possible mitigation strategies are proposed taking into account the state of the art of technology for securing platforms

User-hosted SOA infrastructure over XMPP

The principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) argue for the design of systems composed of re-usable coarse-grained software components which consume and provide services in a service ecosystem. Despite being commonly mentioned in an enterprise context, these are very present in the web - most web applications expose some of their data via APIs, which are then used by other web and mobile applications. The proliferation of user-owned connected devices has brought value to mobile application developers which can make use of locally-available sensors and capabilities and send their information to the web, centralizing the data flows. A more distributed approach would have device capabilities offered directly on the network as services hosted by the user. These pervasive user-hosted services could be made discoverable and available over a public federated service infrastructure. The infrastructure would provide transport over an identity layer, where endpoints are addressed by their identities instead of network identifiers, and on top of which services can be exposed to be consumed by trusted friends or anonymous users, as the hosting user prefers. The work presented in this paper explores the possibility of implementing a distributed social SOA over Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). It differs from traditional SOA because it attempts to counter relative centralization of the web, in favour of a fully-distributed service ecosystem where each peer can behave both as service consumer and provider. Finally, an analysis is done on how suitable XMPP is to serve as a base protocol for such infrastructure