Pervasive computing at tableside : a wireless web-based ordering system

Purpose &ndash; The purpose of this paper is to introduce a wireless web-based ordering system called iMenu in the restaurant industry. Design/methodology/approach &ndash; By using wireless devices such as personal digital assistants and WebPads, this system realizes the paradigm of pervasive computing at tableside. Detailed system requirements, design, implementation and evaluation of iMenu are presented.Findings &ndash; The evaluation of iMenu shows it explicitly increases productivity of restaurant staff. It also has other desirable features such as integration, interoperation and scalability. Compared to traditional restaurant ordering process, by using this system customers get faster and better services, restaurant staff cooperate more efficiently with less working mistakes, and enterprise owners thus receive more business profits. Originality/value &ndash; While many researchers have explored using wireless web-based information systems in different industries, this paper presents a system that employs wireless multi-tiered web-based architecture to build pervasive computing systems. Instead of discussing theoretical issues on pervasive computing, we focus on practical issues of developing a real system, such as choosing of web-based architecture, design of input methods in small screens, and response time in wireless web-based systems.<br /

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices

With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of users’ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

Horizon Report 2009

El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologías emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevén tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigación y la producción creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. También estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada edición identifica seis tecnologías o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevé emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)

ONLINE MONITORING USING KISMET

Colleges and universities currently use online exams for student evaluation. Stu- dents can take assigned exams using their laptop computers and email their results to their instructor; this process makes testing more efficient and convenient for both students and faculty. However, taking exams while connected to the Internet opens many opportunities for plagiarism and cheating. In this project, we design, implement, and test a tool that instructors can use to monitor the online activity of students during an in-class online examination. This tool uses a wireless sniffer, Kismet, to capture and classify packets in real time. If a student attempts to access a site that is not allowed, the instructor is notified via an Android application or via Internet. Identifying a student who is cheating is challenging since many applications send packets without user intervention. We provide experimental results from realistic test environments to illustrate the success of our proposed approach