Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

Smart objects as building blocks for the internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application

USEM: A ubiquitous smart energy management system for residential homes

With the ever-increasing worldwide demand for energy, and the limited available energy resources, there is a growing need to reduce our energy consumption whenever possible. Therefore, over the past few decades a range of technologies have been proposed to assist consumers with reducing their energy use. Most of these have focused on decreasing energy consumption in the industry, transport, and services sectors. In more recent years, however, growing attention has been given to energy use in the residential sector, which accounts for nearly 30% of total energy consumption in the developed countries. Here we present one such system, which aims to assist residential users with monitoring their energy usage and provides mechanisms for setting up and controlling their home appliances to conserve energy. We also describe a user study we have conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this system in supporting its users with a range of tools and visualizations developed for ubiquitous devices such as mobile phones and tablets. The findings of this study have shown the potential benefits of our system, and have identified areas of improvement that need to be addressed in the future

Adaptive online deployment for resource constrained mobile smart clients

Nowadays mobile devices are more and more used as a platform for applications. Contrary to prior generation handheld devices configured with a predefined set of applications, today leading edge devices provide a platform for flexible and customized application deployment. However, these applications have to deal with the limitations (e.g. CPU speed, memory) of these mobile devices and thus cannot handle complex tasks. In order to cope with the handheld limitations and the ever changing device context (e.g. network connections, remaining battery time, etc.) we present a middleware solution that dynamically offloads parts of the software to the most appropriate server. Without a priori knowledge of the application, the optimal deployment is calculated, that lowers the cpu usage at the mobile client, whilst keeping the used bandwidth minimal. The information needed to calculate this optimum is gathered on the fly from runtime information. Experimental results show that the proposed solution enables effective execution of complex applications in a constrained environment. Moreover, we demonstrate that the overhead from the middleware components is below 2%