‘Tuning out’ or ‘tuning in’? mobile music listening and intensified encounters with the city

Mobile music listening has become an increasingly pervasive part of urban life. Yet it represents an area of enquiry with which urban studies scholars have yet to meaningfully engage. This paper considers the role of mobile music devices in creating new sonic, emotional and social interactions with and within the city. While academic work in this area has emphasized the use of these devices as a ‘tuning out’ of the physicality of the city, we suggest that they might also be used as part of a ‘tuning in’ that enhances the meaning and intensity of engagements with the city. In making this case, the paper considers two areas of academic enquiry that highlight the use of mobile music devices in intensified engagements with the city: first, recent writing on the sonic ecologies of the city that emphasize ‘city sounds’ as part of the urban experience; and second recent advances in the field of urban computing that provide technologies for location-aware music-exchanges and mediated social interactions. The paper emphasizes mobile music listening as one area of critical enquiry that can help develop our understanding of the ways in which the pervasiveness of mobile devices is recalibrating the experience of urban spatiality

A task execution scheme for dew computing with state-of-the-art smartphones

The computing resources of today’s smartphones are underutilized most of the time. Using these resources could be highly beneficial in edge computing and fog computing contexts, for example, to support urban services for citizens. However, new challenges, especially regarding job scheduling, arise. Smartphones may form ad hoc networks, but individual devices highly differ in computational capabilities and (tolerable) energy usage. We take into account these particularities to validate a task execution scheme that relies on the computing power that clusters of mobile devices could provide. In this paper, we expand the study of several practical heuristics for job scheduling including execution scenarios with state-of-the-art smartphones. With the results of new simulated scenarios, we confirm previous findings and better comprehend the baseline approaches already proposed for the problem. This study also sheds some light on the capabilities of small-sized clusters comprising mid-range and low-end smartphones when the objective is to achieve real-time stream processing using Tensorflow object recognition models as edge jobs. Ultimately, we strive for industry applications to improve task scheduling for dew computing contexts. Heuristics such as ours plus supporting dew middleware could improve citizen participation by allowing a much wider use of dew computing resources, especially in urban contexts in order to help build smart cities.publishedVersio

Kuruma: The Vehicle Automatic Data Capture for Urban Computing Collaborative Systems

Smartphones can provide coverage in large areas all around the world and with the availability of powerful operating systems they can become solid sensing infrastructures. In fact, static sensors are hard to deploy and maintain while modern mobile devices include many sensors that can be used to sense and benefit from collaborative communities. This project tries to improve urban computing by developing a framework able to create monitoring applications for mobile devices, focusing on obtaining the highest degree of interoperability between sensors. A prototype application has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of creating multidisciplinary applications with several different approaches. The application developed consists of a Road Roughness Information System that measures smoothness and detects irregularities on the roads

Towards cloud to device push messaging on android: Technologies, possibilities and challenges

In this paper we look at different push messaging alternatives available for Android. Push messaging provides an im-portant aspect of server to device communication, and we specifically focus on the integration of cloud computing with mo-bile devices through the use of push-based technologies. By conducting a benchmarking test, we investigate the performance of four relevant push technologies for the Android platform, namely C2DM, XMPP, Xtify and Urban Airship. The compari-son focuses on three aspects of the libraries: 1) The stability; 2) Response times; and 3) Energy consumption. The test is con-ducted on both WLAN and 3G, and includes several mobile device types. Additionally, we also integrate with the Google App Engine to provide the cloud integration server that is responsible for sending push messages to the mobile devices

Energy-efficient Communications in Cloud, Mobile Cloud and Fog Computing

This thesis studies the problem of energy efficiency of communications in distributed computing paradigms, including cloud computing, mobile cloud computing and fog/edge computing. Distributed computing paradigms have significantly changed the way of doing business. With cloud computing, companies and end users can access the vast majority services online through a virtualized environment in a pay-as-you-go basis. %Three are the main services typically consumed by cloud users are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Mobile cloud and fog/edge computing are the natural extension of the cloud computing paradigm for mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Based on offloading, the process of outsourcing computing tasks from mobile devices to the cloud, mobile cloud and fog/edge computing paradigms have become popular techniques to augment the capabilities of the mobile devices and to reduce their battery drain. Being equipped with a number of sensors, the proliferation of mobile and IoT devices has given rise to a new cloud-based paradigm for collecting data, which is called mobile crowdsensing as for proper operation it requires a large number of participants. A plethora of communication technologies is applicable to distributing computing paradigms. For example, cloud data centers typically implement wired technologies while mobile cloud and fog/edge environments exploit wireless technologies such as 3G/4G, WiFi and Bluetooth. Communication technologies directly impact the performance and the energy drain of the system. This Ph.D. thesis analyzes from a global perspective the efficiency in using energy of communications systems in distributed computing paradigms. In particular, the following contributions are proposed: - A new framework of performance metrics for communication systems of cloud computing data centers. The proposed framework allows a fine-grain analysis and comparison of communication systems, processes, and protocols, defining their influence on the performance of cloud applications. - A novel model for the problem of computation offloading, which describes the workflow of mobile applications through a new Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technique. This methodology is suitable for IoT devices working in fog computing environments and was used to design an Android application, called TreeGlass, which performs recognition of trees using Google Glass. TreeGlass is evaluated experimentally in different offloading scenarios by measuring battery drain and time of execution as key performance indicators. - In mobile crowdsensing systems, novel performance metrics and a new framework for data acquisition, which exploits a new policy for user recruitment. Performance of the framework are validated through CrowdSenSim, which is a new simulator designed for mobile crowdsensing activities in large scale urban scenarios

Exploring traffic and QoS management mechanisms to support mobile cloud computing using service localisation in heterogeneous environments

In recent years, mobile devices have evolved to support an amalgam of multimedia applications and content. However, the small size of these devices poses a limit the amount of local computing resources. The emergence of Cloud technology has set the ground for an era of task offloading for mobile devices and we are now seeing the deployment of applications that make more extensive use of Cloud processing as a means of augmenting the capabilities of mobiles. Mobile Cloud Computing is the term used to describe the convergence of these technologies towards applications and mechanisms that offload tasks from mobile devices to the Cloud. In order for mobile devices to access Cloud resources and successfully offload tasks there, a solution for constant and reliable connectivity is required. The proliferation of wireless technology ensures that networks are available almost everywhere in an urban environment and mobile devices can stay connected to a network at all times. However, user mobility is often the cause of intermittent connectivity that affects the performance of applications and ultimately degrades the user experience. 5th Generation Networks are introducing mechanisms that enable constant and reliable connectivity through seamless handovers between networks and provide the foundation for a tighter coupling between Cloud resources and mobiles. This convergence of technologies creates new challenges in the areas of traffic management and QoS provisioning. The constant connectivity to and reliance of mobile devices on Cloud resources have the potential of creating large traffic flows between networks. Furthermore, depending on the type of application generating the traffic flow, very strict QoS may be required from the networks as suboptimal performance may severely degrade an application’s functionality. In this thesis, I propose a new service delivery framework, centred on the convergence of Mobile Cloud Computing and 5G networks for the purpose of optimising service delivery in a mobile environment. The framework is used as a guideline for identifying different aspects of service delivery in a mobile environment and for providing a path for future research in this field. The focus of the thesis is placed on the service delivery mechanisms that are responsible for optimising the QoS and managing network traffic. I present a solution for managing traffic through dynamic service localisation according to user mobility and device connectivity. I implement a prototype of the solution in a virtualised environment as a proof of concept and demonstrate the functionality and results gathered from experimentation. Finally, I present a new approach to modelling network performance by taking into account user mobility. The model considers the overall performance of a persistent connection as the mobile node switches between different networks. Results from the model can be used to determine which networks will negatively affect application performance and what impact they will have for the duration of the user's movement. The proposed model is evaluated using an analytical approac

Every Cloud Has a Push Data Lining: Incorporating Cloud Services in a Context-Aware Application

We investigated context-awareness by utilising multiple sources of context in a mobile device setting. In our experiment we developed a system consisting of a mobile client, running on the Android platform, integrated with a cloud-based service. These components were integrated using pushmessaging technology.One of the key featureswas the automatic adaptation of smartphones in accordance with implicit user needs. The novelty of our approach consists in the use of multiple sources of context input to the system, which included the use of calendar data and web based user configuration tool, as well as that of an external, cloud-based, configuration file storing user interface preferences which, pushed at log-on time irrespective of access device, frees the user from having to manually configure its interface.The systemwas evaluated via two rounds of user evaluations (n = 50 users), the feedback of which was generally positive and demonstrated the viability of using cloud-based services to provide an enhanced context-aware user experience

A bluetooth wireless network infrastructure for multimedia guidebooks on mobile computing devices

This paper describes the implementation of a Bluetooth Village Guide Book (VGB) scenario for use in the Kelvin Grove Urban Village located in Brisbane, Australia. An Information Point Station Network (IPSN) was developed, along with software for two types of mobile computing devices. The implementation consists of several Information Point Stations (IPSs) placed at locations of significance, with access to information items on a centralized server. Once registered, the user is given the opportunity to experience context-aware information on demand and in various multimedia formats. These information items are selected by the user, either by way of a menu system appearing on their mobile computing device or a more intuitive pointer-tag system. Information items are then ‘beamed’ via Bluetooth to the user’s mobile computing device for the user to view The implementation was found to be successful and was tested with multiple users accessing information items from a given IPS as well as multiple IPSs attached to the centralized server. Still, there is further work to be done on the VBG software, the user registration system and on creating an embedded solution for the individual Information Point Stations